Each of us has our own version of reality spinning away inside our minds, filtering and interpreting the data that percolate into our brains via our senses, adding to the cognitively biased interpretation of physical reality around us. For most of us this is a pretty happy personal reality, but sometimes we will expose ourselves willingly to a narrative that challenges this happy reality, usually in the form of ‘scary’ movies and video games, as well as harrowing rides at entertainment parks that push our bodies to new, scary experiences.
Since we know that the risk is all fake, this can be done safely, leaving us only with the remnants of the adrenaline rush as we leave the theatre, step out of the ride or close the video game. It is quite a way to get that buzz and feeling of being well and truly alive.
Those are just some of the ways that we lie to ourselves, as most of us remain content and wrapped up in the warm safety blanket of this comfortable interpretation of reality. After all, over in actual reality every day people suffer horrific accidents. Every day people are abused and physically violated or mutilated by real-life monsters. Every day people die, are injured or otherwise exposed to the realities of wars and violent conflicts.
We just don’t want to have to confront reality, as our fake, personalised realities are much more comfortable. Besides, those aspects of reality are too scary to deal with.
The bloodied woman who sits dazed on the tarmac, looking at the mangled stump that used to be her carefully manicured hand, until right before that terrible traffic accident. The soldier who navigates around barely recognisable human shapes in the mud and dirt of the artillery-blasted landscape, pushing memories of now dead comrades to the back of his mind. The accusing, empty eyes. The taut, decaying skin, revealing the rotting innards and a skull’s grin.
The person who feels more and more trapped every passing day in a medical system where symptoms that destroyed their happy life are waved away, ignored and minimised as they wonder whether it might not be better to just end it all.
Another life, another woman, a happy date, a happy relationship, a horrific outcome. A surgeon working furiously to save a woman’s life in the operating room, even as with each glance he can see the sputtering flame of life slowly bleed out of her.
Death. Betrayal. Violence. Horrific, life-altering injuries. All of them an inevitable part of physical reality. It’s comfortable to ignore their existence. To joke and laugh, or partition it away as part of some kind of religious or spiritual matter and rituals.
Live, laugh and be merry today, because tomorrow it may be too late.
Perhaps trauma, the experience of seeing reality without the comfort of cognitive biases, can be considered an enlightening experience. Although it strongly affects those of us who experience severe trauma, the memories are perhaps not necessarily the worst part, but rather having to return to a society for whom this reality is alien.
Strolling between the partying and arguing masses, looking at their daily lives and considering their dreams and ambitions, it feels like you are the alien one. You have seen the other side of the veil. You can see now what is real and what is pretence. You can no longer be one of them.
That is where the tension gets the worst, as you still live in the same society, but you are now being treated like you’re broken. Like you’re crazy. Being scared of things that don’t make sense.
There is no war here. Nobody is going to attack you. Crossing a street is perfectly safe. This country has the best healthcare system possible. It was just a one time thing. All surgeons lose patients. Not all people are like that.
You know what you have experienced, almost like a glimpse at the faces of the Elder Gods and you having realised to your horror the smallness and insignificance of everything that you once thought to be important and normal in human society.
You know that you are not broken. Society is what is broken. All those people who live inside their safe, comfortable pretend realities, one traumatic experience away from having that fragile reality shattered, and to be exposed to the sheerness and horrors of actual, physical reality.
Maya