I have written before about the malleability of what we call facts and alluded to how I’ve had a lifetime of not quite trusting my brain. Here’s some of the backstory.
Stick with me here, I promise there’s a punchline to all this.
Setting the stage
As a very young child, I had an imaginary friend. The only thing I remember about him now is that when I was small, he was every bit as real to me as my brothers and sister. He was a valuable friend who I relied on to help me cope, but as I got a little older and my foothold on the real world got more firm, I assume maybe around 5 years old, he faded away.
Also, as a young child and on until I was perhaps 12, I believed with utter certainty and obsessiveness that God existed, as did Heaven with its literal pearly gates and golden roads, and Hell with an eternal lake of fire. By the time I was a teenager I had grave doubts about this, and somewhere into my early adulthood, with sincere apologies to my Christian friends, I came to the realization that god and heaven and hell were every bit as real as my childhood imaginary friend.
My point in telling you this is to show that, from my earliest days, I was hopping around the fuzzy line between what was real and what was imagination. I could say so much more on this topic, but that would turn this entire post into a digression
The imaginary policeman
When I was in my earliest twenties, so this was in the mid 1980s, I was taking night classes at a college near San Diego, California, about 45 minutes south of where I lived in Oceanside. One very late night while speeding home from school on the freeway, I was pulled over by the police.
Or, I was pretty sure at the time that I was.
It was very dark out. The officer came to the driver-side window and asked for my driver’s license. I explained that I didn’t have one, but that I did have a learner’s permit. I fished the permit out of the glove compartment and handed it out the window to the policeman, and he walked with it back to his car.
This wasn’t my first speeding ticket. In fact, I think it was at least my third: all before I was even a licensed driver. I really needed to get around to getting my license! (What was keeping that officer so long?) I knew at some point I could get into potentially serious trouble if I kept this up. I began to worry about what kind of trouble I might be in. Maybe he was calling in to headquarters about me. Could I actually be arrested?
After worrying for what seemed like a very long time, I adjusted my rear-view mirror to see what was going on. And there was nothing there.
Wait. Where was the police car? There had been one there before, right? Why was I sitting there at the side of the road? Now that I think about it, was I really sure I’d actually even been pulled over? Maybe there had never been a police car at all!
I stepped out of the car to be sure, checking that my car was truly the only one along the road. Had I imagined, even hallucinated, the whole thing? But surely it had been real: he’d asked me for my license! Now in a panic, I searched on the ground to look for my learner’s permit, which I was realizing I must have simply tossed out of the window at an imagined policeman. But it wasn’t there. Probably it had long since been blown away into the night by the drafts of passing cars.
Finally I got back into my car and, in a bit of a panic, continued my drive to Oceanside. By the time I got to my apartment I was extremely upset and in tears.
I explained everything to my husband and begged him to help me find out if it had been real. He called the California Highway Patrol and after a great deal of time was able to confirm what had happened: I actually had been pulled over, but the policeman had received an urgent call and had to leave. There was no apology and no mention of my learner’s permit.
It was an enormous relief to know that I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. But more than that, it was quite upsetting that it had been so easy for me to convince myself with utter sureness that a real experience had only been imagined. And even more troubling was that I had quite easily jumped to the least logical explanation without the obvious one ever occurring to me.
Was this normal? Does everyone go through things like this?
Who does that?!
Oh yeah, a few important details
There are two little details I should add to this story. Let’s go back in time a bit…
First, shortly before my 12th birthday, I was running down a path that I didn’t realize ended at a ~15-foot cliff. I awoke in a hospital where I stayed for about a week with a double skull fracture and what later would have been called a traumatic brain injury, or TBI. I don’t remember too much about that now, except that I was thrilled that it got me out of having to go to PE class at school for the rest of the year.
Second, just about a year after my accidental cliff jump and resulting TBI, I started experimenting with drugs. Now, this was the southern California suburbs in the 1970s, when teenage drug use mostly involved just smoking a lot of pot and drinking a lot of beer. Cocaine, heroin, and other much harsher things certainly existed, but not in my little world: This is not going to turn into an addiction story.
I stopped all the drug use when I was just 17. By then I had only taken hallucinogens maybe a dozen times, but it was enough to leave me with the occasional small flashback and some interesting ideas about reality.
The punchline: Reality is malleable
So, back to my apartment in Oceanside in the mid ’80s—I had assumed that my somewhat spicy past is the reason why I had jumped to the laughably absurd conclusion that I had imagined the policeman. I assumed I must have had a doozy of a flashback.
But I hadn’t. It had been real.
Once I had calmed down, I was able to see that the whole thing was actually pretty funny. Weird, yes. Embarrassing, oh definitely! But also very funny. Not to mention a damn lucky escape from a potentially sticky legal situation: If that cop hadn’t been called away I might have gotten a pretty high fine, or worse.
And this was when I had the “ah-ha response” that is the whole point of this post: I saw with utter clarity that it was all on me. My reaction to the experience had turned what could have been a funny anecdote about an outlandish assumption into a hugely upsetting, overly-dramatic episode.
This realization is what puts this absurd story near the top of my list of formative life experiences. This was when I realized that my experience of the world, the very reality I live in, is very strongly shaped by my attitude and reactions.
And this isn’t just me, it’s everyone.
I’m not saying you can change the world with your bright smile or warm heart. I can’t simply smile myself out of having had a car accident or a terrible illness. But my reaction to hardship has a huge impact on my life while I am experiencing what happens.
Taking this further, at least to some extent, my reaction to an experience can impact the outcome. As my outlook affects my own experience, it also influences those around me. My positive vibe helps those around me remain positive, and even when I am experiencing something that is horrible, my head will be clearer and I’ll do a better job of dealing with my situation if I maintain a positive outlook.
On the flip side, if someone thinks everything is horrible, then they’re right: for them, it really is. Their reactions and attitudes have contributed to that and will keep it that way. And their negativity will affect others around them and can ultimately affect the outcome of the experience.
Much of an experience hinges on your attitude about it, so to at least some extent, reality is malleable.
Of course, this can be dangerous, because people shape the world with their political decisions. And our political decisions are based on our perceptions of reality. And too many of us base those decisions on what could be exaggerations, misconceptions, or even blatant lies without researching them. But this is best left to another post…
Reality is malleable. And there is the main punchline to my story about the imagined policeman.
Because reality is malleable, if you take the approach that positivity is there if you look for it, even in hardship, then it is: and your world will look a little brighter. Of course everyone has their own reality they must deal with, and some are harder than others. But a little positivity can go a long way toward making at least the small moments more bearable.