And as your brain takes in new experiences and new ideas, it makes a whole other set of connections and your opinions waver, or they don’t. And your life becomes better or worse, because of it.
Seeing things in a new way and then changing your mind isn’t weakness.
It’s LEARNING.
That’s the take-home message of my life.
It’s all just learning.
I had a friend criticize me once. She said, “You change your mind a lot. I don’t understand you. One day you say this, another day you say something completely different, and then you change your mind again.”
I was like… “What’s your point?
And I didn’t say it to be a bitch, either. I just truly didn’t understand what she was saying. Until that moment it had never even occurred to be that some people do not reevaluate their worldview on a regular basis.
I don’t know what to think about that. But my answer to her, after she told me her point (which was that I was confusing her) was, “I’m allowed to change my mind. I’m allowed to form new opinions about things and throw away the bullshit I no longer need, and start over. I don’t need anyone’s permission to do that. There doesn’t need to be some public coming-to-Jesus-moment where I fess up about my mistakes. I just get to do it and no one gets to tell me I can’t.”
She didn’t get it. And, no surprise here, we’re no longer friends.
But I learned something from that encounter. I learned that not everyone sees things MY WAY.
It’s not that I expected people to see things my way. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is this—and this had been scientifically PROVEN, OK? Are you ready? Here it is:
People see things differently.
FULL STOP.
It has been scientifically PROVEN that we all interpret the world in different ways. And this can be something as simple as what the color RED looks like, to something very complicated like “When does life begin.”
This happens because we are all different. You’ve heard that before. As a trained scientist I heard it a lot in college and grad school. If you’re in medicine they drill this fact home to you hard.
Every patient responds differently to drugs. Why? Because, while we are all the same species, we are not all the same. We are all different. Our genetic code, our brains, the neurons in those brains and how they make new connections—they all come with their own strengths and weaknesses. They are all unique.
WE are all unique.
And here’s the other very important thing to realize—we can only ever know what WE FEEL, and WHAT WE SEE, and what WE EXPERIENCE.
We cannot EVER know what others feel, or see, or experience. Because we have not perfected the “mind meld” yet. You can’t see inside someone’s brain. You cannot BE them. Thus, you cannot ever understand how they see the world and how it might be the same, or different, as the way you see the world.
This is the mystery called CONSCIOUSNESS.
When I wrote Ford Aston it was kind of a joke. He was so “unfeeling” so “logical” so “distant”. He gave no fucks. And I say it was a joke because I’m a lot like Ford and I was just kinda writing a person like myself.
Someone once asked me if I has Asperger’s. I kid you not. I laughed at them. I was like “What the fuck? Why would you even think that? I have like a genius IQ, I live a pretty normal life, I’m… normal.”
But… what is normal? I had always thought I was normal. But, there is no real “normal”. So, hell, maybe I was some kind of high-functioning Asperger’s person?
How would I ever know?
This is my point. I don’t know. I’m not interested in knowing, BTW. I’m not gonna go get tested. If I do have some kind of Spectrum issue, I’ve learned how to deal with it so who cares?
I don’t know. I can’t know. Because “normal” to me is just that. Me.
This is why I love storytelling in the first person.
Because when I write a story in the first person I get to BE someone else.
For real.
This is like… a fucking miracle, ya know?
Think about it – writing a story is like being God. You get full control over everything that happens. So when I write first person I not only get to be someone else, I get to plan every action, every moment, every word, and every experience. All of it is under my control.
And I get to be them.
I get to see the world the way they see it. I get to feel emotions the way they feel them. I get to experience conflict, and problems, and make mistakes, and learn new things, and reevaluate my life, and try again, and make more mistakes, and learn from that too. When I write stories in first person I get to live OTHER LIVES.
And you—when you read stories in the first person you get to do that WITH ME.
This is the miracle of storytelling.
So when this person told me that I confused her because I change my mind about things all the time, I learned something.
I learned that her experience of confusion with me was just as valid as my experience of confusion with her.
All points of view are valid in the context of the person experiencing them.
I really do have a point that connects this to Creeping Beautiful and here it is:
Indie Anna Accorsi is the most unreliable narrator since Junco. I have written lots of other fairly unreliable narrators before. James Fenici is unreliable, Sydney Channing is unreliable, even Sasha Cherlin has her own unreliable moments. In fact, when you think about it, we’ll all unreliable narrators in the context of the “bigger world”. Because we have blinders on called “SELF”.
But Indie is an unreliable narrator in the very strict, literal sense of the word. She has memory lapses. So what she thinks happened, and what other people perceive as reality, are disconnected. I say this because going forward this will be important. Her relationship with Nathan wasn’t the way she wrote it in this book.
It’s a valid interpretation of her point of view of that relationship, but it’s not the ONLY valid point of view.
McKay, Adam, and Donovan each have a point of view about Nathan too. And their views are just as valid as Indie’s.
And like me, when asked if I had Asperger’s and why I change my mind about things so much—there is always a moment when you realize—Hmm. Maybe I should take another look at how I perceive this particular thing? Maybe I am wearing blinders? Maybe there’s another interpretation of this person, or event, or problem that can help me see it more clearly?
Keep that in mind as you read the other books in this series.
So back to Creeping Beautiful and coming clean. We have a quartet of impossibly imperfect people in this book. And… just a word of advice here—don’t trust anything Indie said in her chapters. I’m sure she THINKS it’s all real and true… but the take-home message about Indie Anna Accorsi is that she’s fucking damaged.
McKay is filled with shame and guilt. And let’s just get this out of the way right now. There is no life, there is no instance of reality where buying a ten-year-old girl at a slave auction is a good thing. Ever.
But… you know. In the world of the Company, I can certainly see why Adam and Donovan thought it was a good idea. At the very least, it was the best-case scenario in a very fucked-up reality.
But that doesn’t make right.