The Illusion of Connection: A Tale of Self-Deception
“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.” -The Idiot
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What can you say about someone who knowingly deceives themselves? Someone whose mind is screaming at them to stop, telling them they are being deceived? Their mind warns them of the abyss ahead, but they choose to plug their ears and march forward – only to fall straight into that same abyss. Who could possibly deceive such a person, someone who’s already fooling themselves?
I was able to look through their stories. And I caught on to the contradictions that sometimes slipped through their words. But time and again, I let it pass, ignoring it as though I hadn’t heard or understood anything. Yes, I turned a deaf ear to the scream of my mind, its warnings, and blinded myself to the inconsistencies, chose ignorance. And I took pride in my choice.
Even though deep down, I understood. Everything.
And when the inevitable happened, the moment of confrontation, that I had been avoiding for ages, they would just try to gaslight me. Me! such a sheep🤧🤣
YOU must’ve misheard, or YOU must have forgotten, twisting the narrative so I’d doubt myself.
If only their story had just a couple of inconsistencies, it might have been manageable, but when the entire story is altered, what could you possibly do?
Yet even after their attempts at gaslighting, my response was still:
“It’s okay. Even if you lied, you’re only human. We all make mistakes.”
Can you believe I did that?
It was as if I implicitly gave them permission to lie to me again and again, in an endless cycle, and I promised I’d never complain – so long as they kept giving me what I needed from them.
My desire to stay with them wasn’t some sort of a grand expectation. It was just another lowly and a simple need:
I wanted to be able to emotionally open up to someone. I was feeling that the fear of judgement had fallen off my shoulders. And, this was an environment in which I was allowed to reveal my inner self.
Whether it was due to their initial love bombing or the way they opened up about themselves (whether that was truth or fiction), or our ‘similar sufferings,’ I found myself able to speak in their presence. Rhetorically speaking, words that I had never even uttered to myself.
I laid myself bare before them, unveiling the ‘tablet of my past.’ I did not care if they might use my vulnerabilities against me. It was simply out of my control. I had let loose the monster that I had caged for years and now, it was not going to be tamed again.
So to speak, for so many years, I had stood in front of a mirror, but I had never truly looked into it. Because I was so freaking afraid of even a glance of the reflection. And thankfully, they were the ones who showed me the mirror.
And what did the mirror say when I finally looked into it?
It told me the truth I had been running from all along. It showed me a person who was terrified of being alone – not physically, but emotionally. The reflection revealed that I was willing to sacrifice honesty for the illusion of connection, just to avoid the chilling loneliness that gnawed at me.
The mirror told me I had always known.
In that reflection, I saw a person who had traded trust for validation, acceptance for understanding, and self-respect for a few fleeting moments of comfort. A false one.
The Mirror did not offer pity or didn’t sugar-coat the harsh reality it displayed. Because, I wasn’t looking for a way out of the abyss. I was looking at the person who had willingly jumped into it.
