Words Unsaid

|29| Unreliable Narrator

//Unreliable Narrator: In literature, an unreliable narrator is a character who tells a story with a lack of credibility. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction.//

I think one of the hardest things I've come to realize this year is that things are never quite how they seem. No matter how much we argue about the objectivity of our vision, the subjectivity of our memories prevail in the end. We, conveniently, only remember what we want to. We, conveniently, only see what we want to. If this doesn't make our minds one of the most unreliable narrators out there, I don't know what does.

I'd always been an avid reader of romance, which forced rose-colored sunglasses on me. This vision made a tiny crush mature into something it should never have been matured into. I projected all my ideas of a perfect love interest onto this one oblivious person, not knowing that all I was doing was setting myself up for future disappointment. While I never talked to him, I kept thinking about him, made him into something he's not. I created a whole new person out of the little pieces of him I was familiar with and then, I made him fall in love with me. Little did I know, this version would only ever remain in my head.

At the back of my head, I knew what I was doing, but I was helpless to the whim of my rose-tinted vision. I only saw what I wanted to see; my fantasies muddled up my reality. I remembered that one time he sought me out and erased out the ten other times he avoided me.

It's finally dawning up on me how we can never actually see the true picture of anything, not even ourselves-no two people will have the same version of me in their heads. If life's a movie, our mind is the editor and an editor only lets you see the bits he thinks you should and never-never-the complete picture.

So yes, I faced the inevitable disappointment and shed the inevitable tears but at least now, I'm moving forward with the knowledge that we're all unreliable narrators of our lives. If I can't trust my senses anymore, if my what-is is always going to be polluted by my what-could've-beens, I don't know where to go, I don't know what to do.