Confessions on the 7:45

by Lisa Unger

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” —George Orwell, 1984

Everyone was on broadcast these days, thrusting out versions of themselves, cropped and filtered for public consumption. Everyone putting on the “show of me.” It was when people were alone, unobserved, that the mask came off.

It was a good thing people didn’t talk anymore. In this Instagram world, everyone wanted to broadcast filtered versions of their best moments, and bury everything else. All the dull, shameful things, all the flawed, failed ventures and endeavors, hidden. Where did people put those things?

“Society doesn’t always know what’s right. Our families tell us stories about ourselves that often aren’t true. Sometimes we have to follow our hearts.”

She liked the shadows. That’s where you got to see all the things that other people missed.

She wanted what everyone wanted these days, to be a star, someone wealthy and lauded for no good reason. She wanted to be perfect. No. She wanted to appear perfect to others. But nothing was ever perfect. Nothing real. So it was a losing battle that left her feeling perpetually empty.

But mainly, people were so wrapped up in their own inner hurricane that they never saw anything outside the storm of themselves.

Arrested development. When a person stops maturing at a point of trauma, grief, or at a place in her life when she felt the profound and total loss of love from a primary caregiver.

When the same thing happens again and again, we have to look at that. We have to unpack it and figure out why we cause ourselves and others pain.

But that was the world now, everyone in their little silo, broadcasting versions of their lives from a screen, onto the screens of others.

Story is story, Stella said. It’s a portal you walk through into another world. And this world—which usually sucks—just disappears.

Could life change so fast? Could you be one person on Monday, and someone else by Sunday?

People didn’t fall in love with other people. They fell in love with how other people made them feel about themselves. And so, it was easy to get someone to love you—if you knew how they wanted to feel.

most of all she was a survivor. She chose the path that kept her fighting another day.

He didn’t view himself as just a con. He saw himself as a dream weaver.

Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.