Lie to Me

So....it's January. I guess I'm on target for two entries per year - good thing blogging is not my job! 2012 was not a great year. Not at all. And 2013? As it's January, the jury is still out but let's just say the evidence so far is not in favor of it being an improvement on its predecessor.

In December and January people tend to get introspective, thinking about things that have happened and making plans, or at least imagining intentions, for a better future. I have a long and checkered past of hunkering down with my paper and pencil on December 31st, scratching out some half-hearted promise of change for the better in the following 12 months. It's hard to fathom what the future, even the near future, will bring, and I don't think I ever got one thing right.

The past can be just as tricky. And we have a tendency to want to rewrite the story. We want to remember things in a way that suits us...our temperament, our image, the argument we are in at the time. And memory itself is unreliable - every cop show on TV preaches that. I am not immune to the temptation (I've been known to embellish history myself).

This weekend I am alone, and was supposed to spend all day today working. Instead (shocker), I had a Netflix marathon of Lie to Me. It's really fascinating, a crime procedural based on micro-expressions and universal signs of emotion. In one episode, they asked a guy who was clearly making crap up on the go to reverse the timeline and tell his story backwards. Of course he couldn't, because it's impossible to remember all the lies, especially the spontaneous ones.

I'm struggling at the moment with not rewriting history. Even though I don't want to, I think I lie to me sometimes. I tend to see things through the lens of whatever I'm feeling at the moment, or whatever I want to prove. Seldom were things actually as awful - or as epic -  as I remember them. In the heat of an argument it's easy to start throwing around words like "always" and "never", which definitely leads to a rewrite of history, i.e. a lie. It's hard to step back and take a breath and really evaluate what happened and how it applies. I mean, that's what the psychologists and counselors want you to do, and they've even invented a magnet to help the conversation have those kinds of pauses (I'm not kidding, it's yellow and white and you're supposed to hand it back and forth and....I digress). But it's hard to do when accusations are flying and hearts are shattering.

Sometimes I want to lie to me. I want to remember something differently or explain it differently or just....do it over differently. I want to think I wasn't such a jerk, or so insensitive...or so ignorant. I want to lie to me so that I sound better than I was, so that the offense I caused was smaller, so that the cues I missed were less obvious. I want to lie to me so that the other person is the ogre, so that I'm the victim, so that it wasn't my fault, at all or in part. Sometimes the facts are the facts and my memory is skewed, which is also a kind of lie. I guess I could take a cue from the show and watch my face and body language for tells...but...that means I would have to always be talking to myself in a mirror...which would be awkward....or maybe it's time for serious introspection, turning the mirror on my thought processes and trying to not lie to me, or at least to start recognizing those universal expressions. And I can pay more attention to the tells, the "indicators and manipulators", the emotional cues, the non-verbals that shout so loudly, so nobody else can lie to me, either.