Being from the NY area, I am often sarcastic on this site, and I have often been told that my humor does not come through in print. (My H has also on occasion told me that I'm not funny in real life either, but I don't take him seriously.) So I wanted to be sure that people weren't reading this sardonic humor wrong.
[quote=SmileysPerson] There we are, smiling into the camera, the four of us. A lie.
You go too far. Not a lie, SP. Different today? Yes, and I wish you weren't hurting. But it was true and goodness when those smiles were time stamped...not a lie.
True, but it's also true that looking at those old photos through a different lens changes everything. It's amazing when one looks at old photos how what knowing now what one didn't know then changes their meaning... but, to your point, they weren't lies at the time... and, the thing about photos is they can be imbued with different meanings by different people, and, through the passage of time different meanings by the same people, too...
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it is whatever you decide it is or was.
Truth is truth. And hindsight isn't always 20/20 b/c one brings today's perspective to yesterday - and that does indeed change the look of things...but not the Truth.
So when I look at pics of Coach, me and the little team, knowing now what I didn't know then, I still know that we were a family then, loved each other - no matter what was coming. It wasn't a "lie".
Me45 H46 T25 M22 S21 & 19 D13 Separated and filed 8/08 Moved home 11/08
I look at pictures from the past fairly often, my kids like to see pictures from when they were 'little' (they are only 3 and 6!) so it happens a lot.
I know it was 'real' when it happened, those smiling faces...but sometimes I wonder what I would say to that particular 'me' if I could go back and talk to her, knowing what I know now...but that isn't very productive now is it?
Truth is truth. And hindsight isn't always 20/20 b/c one brings today's perspective to yesterday - and that does indeed change the look of things...but not the Truth.
So when I look at pics of Coach, me and the little team, knowing now what I didn't know then, I still know that we were a family then, loved each other - no matter what was coming. It wasn't a "lie".
Yes, I agree and was kind of making that point that one may make a determination that it was a "lie" or it wasn't real and one may function with that as his reality but that doesn't make it the "truth." However, the objective truth isn't really the point when living in your own subjective reality...no I'm not stoned.
I just had to ask this L yesterday who was literally talking sh*t about his ex-wife (divorced 30 years ago, mother of his two kids and she since died of cancer) if he did anything wrong in that marriage and he paused and answered "no, I was actually really great," and then he continued to recall all of the ways she was the problem...
That was just a testament of how completely distorted a person's interpretation of the "truth" can be.
OH, what was my point? Sorry SP. Point was that it was as real as it was and now things are different.
There is a subjectivity to "truth" that is often held out by some -- as, for example, by Mr. Bill O'Reilly -- as a core difference between "seculuar-progressives" (get it, S.P.?) and "real" Americans. Now I'm not an adherent of post-modernist theory, in that I do believe there are objective realities, but I am willing to credit it with the notion of subjectivity of experience and interpretation.
What is truth and what is a lie? I know from convos recent and recently past that WAW was already thinking down the D road at the time the picture in question was taken. So the smiles in that photograph, while "true" in the literal sense (say 'Cheese' - Cheeeeeeeesse!), seem to impart a meaning to the photograph as a whole -- "we're a happy family" -- that is belied by the subjective, interior reality of at least one person in that photograph ("hmmm, wonder if I should divorce SP?"). So why is she smiling? Because one smiles in a photograph? Smiling is a socially expected performance in group photography? Because she's with the kids? Because of the interior dialog on divorce?
Who knows? But it strikes me that the meaning -- to borrow a phrase from consumer law -- that a "reasonable person" would impart to that photograph is misleading. It isn't a photograph of a happy family. It's a photograph of what appears to be a happy family -- a photograph of a group in which one person is representing herself as a member of a happy family.
It's all very weird.
And the whole question of subjectivity of experience and meaning has been brought into high relief for me by an email exchange with WAW overnight. Some selections from the series of WAWgrams ought to suffice (my replies in italics) to show why I'm questioning what is real, what isn't, and when it is real, and when it isn't:
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And, you have said yourself and are correct, that we share fault for this....You weren't a bad husband. I was very happy for many years. Things just fell apart.
From my POV "things fell apart" is too passive. Things were made to fall apart...and you've never heard me deny it - that's what your favorite mantra "taking responsibility for yourself" means to me - not tolerating the comfortable lies we tell ourselves to justify and rationalize and explain away. Self awareness is a terrible thing. You've often said you fought like hell and did everything in your power and more, and I threw it all away. That's been your claim, and that's been one basis of my self-evaluations since.
I didn't fight like hell, I just tried, I could have tried harder.
Don't know what to make of that. "Like hell" has been your story thus far, to me and others (and variations - everything, all humanly possible, etc). That's how you evaluated it then & I have no reason to believe you were lying
I wasn't lying. Maybe I have re-evaulated. You said you didn't see it coming, so maybe I wasn't clear and didn't give you enough of a chance. Problem is that until the very end, I didn't really know it was going this direction either. That's why I didn't threaten divorce. Even though I thought about it, I didn't think it would really happen . . . until it did.
When she dropped the D-Bomb, and during the first round of MC after, WAW was fond of the phrase, "That's my Truth." Now there's a different Truth.
What does it all mean? Perhaps it means this whole thing -- separation, divorce, perhaps even relationships themselves as a whole -- is a moving target. Constantly evolving, constantly shifting shape and scope and boundary, never remaining the same and -- ineluctably -- never remaining certain.
Dangerous thoughts. For think about what that implies about DB'ing. "I want him/her back." No; no you don't. You want him/her back now, perhaps; yesterday, perhaps. But tomorrow? Who knows? And as for him/her, who is that? What is the truth of that person? You can't know -- indeed, s/he can't know. And where does that leave you? As if cast adrift on an unknown sea, able only to set your course for the current tide.
