How We Lie to Ourselves about our future

I read this quote, “you can’t picture yourself changing, so you assume you wont”. In Neil Pasricha’s book, You Are Awesome.

It hit me that I try to picture changes but so much of the reality after the change is a lie because I didn’t really know what was coming.

I pictured myself doing “something” away from my hospitality job for the entire 6 years that I worked in it. But when that change came via a global pandemic it wasn’t at all what I had ever pictured.

I now draw cute graphics and put them on greeting cards and mail them all over the world. I didn’t know how to draw anything before I started this. How could I have ever pictured this then?

The reality is, as mentioned, that I didn’t.

But goodness am I grateful for it now. The experiences, the learning. The things I know and the things I know that I don’t like. It’s all be a gift in its own way.

Now I picture what I might do when I move away from this, I still try to imagine it. If I’ll restart it somewhere else and yet in reality again, I don’t know what the picture looks like on the other side.

This picture we attempt to paint inside our minds, our dreams, our hopes. It looks so clear right now. But largely it’s a lie we tell ourselves.

It’s not exactly a bad lie, at least not all the time. But it is mostly a lie.

And that’s okay really, sometimes we need the lie. When we’re in the thick of the dumpster fire trying to claw our way out or just sitting there hoping one day to try and claw our way out.

The lie can be good. It may not be what reality shows us when we look back, but it can still be good in the moment.

This isn’t to say, don’t dream. This is to say dream but realize that not all our dreams are even visible to us yet. What actually happens won’t always be something you ever saw and that’s cool.

It means that there is so much more that can happen, what you might picture and the endless possibilities that you don’t even know about yet.

And I hope that that feels hopeful to you as it does me. Even when we are on top of the world there are possibilities that are yet unknown. When we are in that dumpster fire again, broken up with, family member dies, being evacuated due to wild fires (this one I speak from personal current experience) there are still a million possibilities for what is to come.

We’ve got more chances. Our lives and ourselves will continue to change and grow and mold to what is happening.

Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean the chances and the hope isn’t there.