Sophia Fox-Sowell
When do you realize you’ve made a mistake…?
Is it in those pivotal first few seconds following that terminal decision? Or is the time frame much lengthier? Does it take days, weeks, or even months for the inevitably consequential repercussions to perforate your soul? Like a stain that can’t be removed by vigorous scrubbing or multiple trips to the dry cleaner. It’s always there—an invisible mark on your otherwise picture perfect complexion that can only be seen by looking inward, which no one ever seems to do.
Mistakes are cockroaches that plague the earth, but instead of infectious epidemics, they carry our insecurities and baggage. They never die. No, mistakes have evolved and adapted to modern life so effectively that they simply keep multiplying until not even a nuclear explosion can erase and reset the very first time the imagination centers in our brains lit up, our tongues flapping words about actions that never were.
Mistakes are the lies we tell ourselves.
There are black lies and white lies, and lies in every shade of gray. White lies are innocent and harmless. Telling yourself that you’ll someday fit into a dress that was never made to fit your figure. Black lies are deadly, forcing yourself to believe that sleeping with that mysterious stranger from the bar brought you some small sense of satisfaction and empowerment.
But gray lies—gray lies are dangerous.
Gray lies are the lies we don’t fully understand or know to be untrue. They blur, with strands of truth intertwined with deceit. There’s no clear-cut process to tell the difference between the truth and the illusions we paint for ourselves. No systematic method to rule out all plausible possibilities that maybe you were right all along.
Humans always have hope. God, what a stupid notion!
Hope is like faith. And you know what they say about faith? It’s blind. Hope is complete sensory deprivation.
Gray lies cast a veil over our eyes and inject a slow stream of venom into our hearts. A poison that seeks not to kill, but to maim or paralyze, which is a far more fatal attraction.
But to veterans of this pretense, gray lies are not only second nature, they’re our second language. And we are quite fluent.
Like flower petals plucked so perfunctorily while you’re dizzily daydreaming, hoping to convince fate to come to fruition.
Fate. God, what a stupid notion!
I’ve waited long enough.
Patience is overrated. Those who claim patience to be a virtue must not have wanted anything badly enough to lose themselves in the fray. Patient people have no true ambition. The ambitious do not bide their time, they take it. They manipulate it to suit their needs, forcefully molding the golden opportunity.
A lot like lying.
I lied to him — and he left me.