Patricia McCormick, Bullfighter

In hindsight, I have a recurrent image: one of a bullfight. One where I thought I stumbled out of the ruedo beaten, scratched without any glory, only to find out later I was the bleeding, panting bull on the floor, watching the matador walking away under a rain of roses. I didn’t know that sometimes, some things happen without you knowing the exact dimensions of your involvement. I guess putting things into perspective, that’s life: the reflection between hindsight and present events quickly dissolving into past ones.

For a few weeks I have had a recurring phrase: I deserve to know what happened to me.

Maybe life is protecting me form breaking my heart from humankind. Maybe truth will always be an illusion but thank God I have some good friends. One of them gave me a simple example: “I know my mother-in-law sometimes makes fun of me behind my back, will I ever KNOW that as a fact? No. Will I torture the rest of my life and attempt to figure it out? Why would I do that… to myself?”

True. Things can happen to you, good or bad. And when worse happens, it’s too much to ask to put on your let’s-dance-with-optimism-with-the-cruelty-of-the-world suit but I’m not certainly giving up on trying to make sense of this world, my version of it at least.

Because in the end, we all suffer from fictions. There are things we can’t control out there but usually the hardest crimes are the ones we inflict upon ourselves. We can confine ourselves to solitude, we can allow ourselves to trust anyone out of despair for love or magic or company, we lie to ourselves for comfort’s sake, we can deny ourselves the possibility of change and even worse, we can avoid confronting our fears to learn a painful but valuable lesson.

I have learned things these past few weeks, invaluable ones. For example, one has to keep coherence even to it’s own madness, that consistency will get anyone through hoops of burning fire. There’s always an amount of truth in “lunacy” and many times, there’s a lot of insanity in reality, an insanity so large your head is too small to wrap around it. Never dwell into hate, it’s a waste of good energy into useless one. Trust people, some will remain, some will make fun, keep and harvest the first ones and even if you understand the second ones, let them go, they served the purpose of walking along your life until they could no more. Refuse to become a victim. (I was angry at Les Misérables for a week until I figured out that what I despised of the dramatic characters is the way they let themselves be swept away under the limitations of their circumstances) There are always other options, even when you are about to even (metaphorically) die.

We like to believe in universal fictions like fairness or equality. We all justify our acts or lack thereof with fictions too. We think if we didn’t help out someone was because our needs were greater, because is none of our business or simply because we didn’t want to get involved. We also like to validate our actions so we can live with them, no matter how unjustified our behavior was: someone deserved it, they knew about it or saw it coming. In al truth, we believe what we want to, in order to survive reality, to keep our self-image safe from breaking into pieces, to be relieved from what we didn’t prevent from happening or dared to do. We all have reasons for our actions and limitations in reality and in the fiction of our minds. We all have reasons to deny what’s happening because it might seem so unreal or too confusing or a combination of both.

Knowing these facts a few days away from turning forty is a starting point. This is not a beginning but a crossroad towards inner freedom. Towards recovering spaces either virtual or physical because you finally get to discover that what you write, get inspired and make is in the end, an expression of you and that can’t be challenged, just is.