Insert pic of me with Pinocchio nose?
I remember the time I was cornered by crazed alligators. I cheated death by parachuting off a cliff onto a passing kayak on the mighty Ichetucknee River.
Grabbing one of the alligators as I sailed off the cliff, I had him stuffed. He sits in my office as a daily reminder how short life is.
Okay.
That might be a slight embellishment of the truth.
Linking up with All Things Fadra and a 5 minute unedited stream of consciousness, stream of thought.
GO:
Brian Williams. Good grief. You can’t turn on the news without that being the news.
But it’s got me thinking. Why do we all feel the need to embellish our reality?
I do on this blog well, because it’s makes it more entertaining to read and honestly, more much more fun for me to write.
But when do we cross the line? When does “in search of a good story” become over reaching?
Most of us agree, that sitting around at a dinner party after a glass or two of wine – our life stories become a little more exciting. A little more dramatic. What was truth is now a little bit of truth and a lot of plastic surgery.
For example, eons ago when I was in Texas — in a bar, a DJ from a radio station approached me and said they were doing a contest for Dallas Forth Sexist Women (this was the early 80s, they would have said hottest today.)
TIME
Pooh. In all honesty, that darn timer went off.
The point of that story was this radio guy asked if I wanted to join them and be in the contest. I laughed and went on to the bathroom.
I must have told my mom.
For every once again in a blue moon, if I was feeling unattractive she would say, “Well, you were picked as one of the Dallas Forth Worth prettiest women.”
Of course I wasn’t. But that doesn’t make me correct her — even when she might be saying it in front of a group of people.
Now if she said this a lot, I would correct her. I think.
Hopefully you get my point. Sometimes how events have been twisted over time make us feel better about ourselves.
Or in the retelling we feel that our story as perceived by others not sad enough, scary enough, tragic enough.
I’ve written about the pain of infertility. A pain that was very, very real for me. But what if I felt my inability to get pregnant with interfility treatments, and the humiliation I felt with those treatments and then becoming pregnant without treatment and subsequent miscarriage — not enough.
It was very tragic to me. But is it tragic enough to cut through all the other tragedy out there?
Should I insert five more miscarriages to make me seem really tragic?
Of course not. That would be pathetic and a mockery of all those who struggle daily with the inability to have a child.
I lived that pain. I don’t need to rework my life to make my heartbreak more entertaining for others.
That’s the tipping point for me.
When I reach the point that I feel a need to change a story to make me appear more courageous, more compassionate, more sympathetic than the me that sits here.
When my reality is not enough.
So why is it so difficult these days? Why is the truth – our truth or any truth not enough?
Thoughts? What crosses the line for you?
