Will

by Will Smith

We all delude ourselves a little bit around the things that scare us. We’re afraid of not being accepted by people at work, or at school, or on Twitter, so we convince ourselves that they’re stuck-up or ignorant or cruel. We concoct entire narratives about other people’s lives when in fact we have no clue what they’re thinking or feeling or struggling with. We invent these stories to protect ourselves. We imagine all sorts of things to be true about ourselves or the world, not because we’ve seen evidence for it, but because it’s the only thing that keeps us from collapsing back into fear. Sometimes we’d rather blindfold ourselves than take a cold, hard look at the world exactly as it is. The problem is delusion works like poisoned honey—it tastes sweet in the beginning but ultimately ends in sickness and misery. The stories we tell ourselves, which are designed for our protection, are the same stories that create the walls that prevent the very connections we so desperately crave.