I recently a ran into an acquaintance and in the course of exchanging news about our lives, he mentioned something that he had heard about me, which in fact was the exact opposite of the truth. It wasn’t a malicious type of statement, but it was clearly wrong, and not just a little wrong, but the exact opposite of what had happened to me; moreover I’ve written quite a lot about what actually did happen to me, so it’s not like there’s any question of things not being ‘on the record,’ so to speak, it’s just a case where I wrote and said one thing and was surprised to hear the exact opposite come back to me a little while later, like a game of ‘telephone.’
I’m sorry to be so vague here, but I don’t really want to get into specifics, not only because I’ve already been over this issue many times already, but because it’s less about the actual ‘fact of the matter’ (which is not to diminish its importance to me) than the strange process by which you say one thing and it boomerangs back to you in a completely different form; it would be as if I had spent a year or two writing about a decision to say, go to law school (which I’m obv not doing because I’ve already been there, but let’s pretend for a moment that I hadn’t gone to law school and was making the decision to go and moreover wrote about studying for the LSAT and filling out applications etc. etc.) and then let’s say I was admitted to law school and wrote about how great that was (LOL) at which point I run into my colleague who says, ‘oh, I heard you’re not going to law school.’ Whatever, it’s probably not a great example but you can probably get a sense of my surprise when he said something very similar to me, and his subsequent surprise or perhaps even embarrassment when I informed him that what he had just told me was not only slightly wrong, but really 100-percent off the charts incorrect, i.e., not even close to being right. As it turned out, I ‘set the record straight,’ although I don’t want you to think that I was ‘terribly upset’ by the episode; in fact I just kind of quietly LOL’d (although not too smugly, I hope, because I really detest smug ppl, it’s one of the worst qualities I think anyone can have) and corrected him in a very laid-back manner, because like I said, the acquaintance in question is not someone you would ever characterize as mean-spirited or malicious, although I did have to wonder about who fed him the wrong information and why, i.e., was it an intentional lie or just a failure of the person in question to acknowledge the truth as a result of his or her own (likely unconscious) perceptions or desires, which is not exactly an uncommon scenario, we all do things like that all the time, it’s sort of like a Freudian slip, where we might read one thing and because we want to believe the opposite to be true, or because we suspect the opposite is true, we simply create and swallow a completely unconscious fabrication. In short, we’re lying to ourselves and don’t even realize it.
I made me wonder if I could start spreading lies about myself, with a thought that they might come back to me in a form that more closely resembled the truth.
