Lift the Lid

I was talking to a girl the other night, and she told me that "all good things end, so what's the point?" She was talking about some relationship that had blown up in her face.

I felt sorry for her. She's twenty-five years old, cute as a button, funny, and has a butt like an East German gymnast. For someone like that, life should be all sunshine and roses. But of course it isn't.

When I visited Henley-on-Thames last year, I was confronted by a storybook English town, complete with quaint bridges and people that said good morning to strangers. After staying there a week, I'd seen drunken debauchery, a fight, adultery, mudslinging at a wedding, and a dude whose doctor told him to quit the sauce or he'd die drunk.

Both of these are examples of looks being deceiving. Nothing new there. But it still surprises me what can happen if you lift the lid off something and peer underneath. You might like what you find. Then again, you might not.

Life is funny like that. Take the Austrian girl, the one with the glorious butt. I was sure that she was a hell of a nice person, with a gracious smile and a quick laugh. And I was right. Yet she doesn't see herself that way. She told me that she is 'angry.' When I told her that I saw no anger in her whatsoever, she replied that I didn't know her well enough. It's been another couple of weeks, and I still haven't seen it. I've talked to her about all kinds of stuff, and there's no cynicism there, just a touch of sadness.

Mmmm.

I've heard this story before, and it came from me. And I can tell you now that this young lady is not angry, no matter what she thinks of herself. I used to think I was an angry young man, but on the whole I would say I am happy about 90% of the time. Yet sometimes I want to be angry. I think she does too, but she can't pull it off because hers is not an angry soul.

The truth will out. We may see ourselves as something (a quaint town, an angry person), but that doesn't make it true. Our own conceit can get in the way time and again, blinding us to the simple fact that we are who we are, if we're brave enough to admit it. We were formed sometime in our childhood, and we more or less carried on from there.

Yes, you can change, at least a little bit. When I was a kid I was brought up to believe that fighting was bad and that violence didn't solve anything. I got pushed around. Sometime around the age of 18, I punched somebody in the face and haven't look back since. It was a life-changing moment, and a good one. I'm not recommending it to everybody, and I certainly didn't become a bully, but I did learn that you have to stand up for yourself. That was a good thing.

But on the whole, I'm more or less the same person I was back then. Older, maybe a bit smarter, but not altogether different. If I look under the hood, the same engine fires. Maybe yours does, too.

I'm not talking about maturity. Saying that I am the same person as I was in University does not mean I still like sleeping on a lawn while covered in beer, or that I like to pull on someone's brastraps. But the desire to seek out the world and the willingness to laugh at it hasn't left me. And okay, sure, I still like a good party now and then. All right, all right, mostly now.

The trouble with looking at yourself is the looking. Being bold enough to examine yourself, to be honest about what you see, is tough. I think it was Freud that said no one can psychoanalyse themselves (he also said the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis, so I guess they can forget my whole point), but it's worth giving it a shot now and then.

Scary proposition. Along with the old line of looks being deceiving, don't forget its partner, "Truth hurts."