Shifting Target

they say that truth is a shifting target. or perhaps i just made that up and its a misquoted idiom I messed up because of my immigrant nature. but it makes perfect sense to me.

what happens when your perception betrays you? no one makes me doubt myself more than my own mother. she may perhaps be the most mysterious person in the world to me. that despite the predictable nature of her interactions with me --- her entire life narrative changes from day to day and is a truth I'll never know. In fact, no one even knows what year my mother was born. The answer varies from person to person, from year to year. I suppose it lacks importance -- she has a birth certificate with a certain age - of course because in India you can never assume anything is correct. I feel I embrace my birthday each year with a certain level of significance - that year 27 will be a certain way precisely because it is year 27. Its a silly attachment, the significance of age I suppose, especially considering I still act a mere 21. But with my mother its one of many facts that remains unknown. The facts, whatever few I can discern to be true, namely that she raised all three us in a land far away from her own raises a million questions against the person I know today. Let alone the mountain of secrets.

I've never been a fan of secrets. At a young age, I took an experiment in lying. How far could I go without being questioned. I mastered the art very easily, or so I thought. And then I decided to throw it all away, it seemed to lack a purpose. Better to reinvent your experiences in reality than to create them as lies.
I adopted a brutally honest and blunt nature, that for better for worse I've stuck to. The only thing I ever forthright lied about was the question posed by my family, whether I smoked cigarettes. They know now that I did all those years, I mean they knew then. I had become a terrible liar. But I was lucky that my parents were immigrants, because they never asked the right questions to reveal my other juvenile delinquencies.

I did master the art of being tactful, but I have for better or worse kept my pledge of honesty. I am both perceptive and have a very good memory, so when I re-tell, I perhaps convince myself that I am putting forward the truth, no holds bar. As a "lawyer," I've learned the importance practice of putting together different layers of truth. The truth of my client vs. the truth that pass the Rules of Evidence in federal court vs. the truth of common experience. We learn the changing nature of people's perceptions, of people's narrative and how to discern, to the best of our ability. That through "discovery" in a case, you may find no real truth. I've had only handful of experiences, perhaps slated because my trust in my client against the lies of the exploitative employers colors my vision of key events that have taken place to assume the client offers only the truth. But its also my faith that teaches me that overarching fact of exploitation isn't destroyed by tiny distortions in the details. Working with multiple plaintiffs and multiple stories, you may never piece together the actual events of the day but it lacks significance. Truth is a shifting target. But exploitation was not.

Truth is a shifting target but maintaining "secrets" distorts the world from perceiving the overarching important narrative to make sense of the universe. My parents' secrets distorted my entire understanding of my cultural self. I can't blame people for hiding, for wanting to have a sense of control over people's perceptions of them. We all do it in degrees. We don't want our boss to know that we party hard and get our work done in half the time, we rather them perceive us hard-working. I was told for years, from the day I wrote my college essay, to never reveal to people I struggled with depression because they would foresee me as an impending failure. I wanted to tell the colleges of the strength i had gained by battling depression but I had to reconcile that my perception would not be theirs. I think somewhere deep down inside, I've allowed their perception to become my own.

I understand that in new relationships - meaning anything as simple as a friendship, we at our older age, are not archaeologists digging down and seeking to piece together an entire history. Usually our day to day perceptions can fill the void of needing all the context and background knowledge. In my mother's case perhaps it doesn't but for others I hope it does. Again we can accept that the truth may be a shifting target but have faith our perception usually means something. So when that perception is betrayed, be it deliberately so, it all starts to melt.