snowglobe

In the 1998 hit film The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays a guy living a clueless life. Each day he wakes with “good morning, good afternoon and good night”. Each night he comes home and waxes about fishing with his friend Marlon on the weekend. But there’s a problem. Truman starts to get bored. His wife no longer wants to have sex or go on a dream trip to Fiji. His neighbors begin to act fake. Life seems scripted; almost like he’s on TV. Perfection melts into paranoia there’s a bigger story happening and he’s not in on it. Driven to madness, he sails into a storm towards death to force the revelation he's living a televised drama.

I like this film because underneath the sunshine and roses of Seahaven lies a hidden truth. Every life, every paradise, is born by one desire and killed by another. Just like Adam with the apple, Truman destroys his old paradise for something more. And because desire is the core of our nature, this endless process of self cremation is strangely how we like it. The new job with better prospects will entice us from the old. The dream to express ourselves calls us to write a book. The yearning for travel takes us from home to faraway lands. Desire is the strong force that shapes and breaks our reality and whilst the Buddhists would disagree, life would be extremely boring without it.

But as Truman discovers, not all desire is created equal. Some people like fruit, some like anal sex on airplanes. Some desires are socially acceptable, some we do when no one is watching. Instead of a travel brochure, what if Truman found the Kama Sutra, awakened a dream for the Pretzel, and asked his wife for an orgy with the neighbors? The TV producers would have faced an ethical question; do they move tantra teachers next door and skyrocket their ratings? Or block Truman’s kundalini and frustrate his erotic awakening? Whatever the option, desire creates a problem that won’t go away; and the naughtier the desire, the stranger depths we go to hide it. But then, how do we decide what’s naughty?

Growing up, as we look for rules, we look to community; but social convention has a paradoxical effect on our dark side. Social norms shape our need to belong, but also provoke the desire to break free. People don’t have sex on airplanes because they want to make love in a 3ft cubicle; they want to be mile high because it's forbidden. But then imagine the FAA approved in-flight fornication and airlines promoted it? You’d see the 747 redesigned for six months and then rolled back once people had gotten bored of it. So how much of our desire is fuelled by what’s forbidden? How does it change when it's not? Imagine for example if the mile high club was made compulsory; a very different start to your family summer holiday.

As Truman discovered, the need to belong to the group (Seahaven) is strong, but it doesn’t squash the unmet desires of the individual (Fiji), it only pushes them to the extremes to be achieved (sailing into the storm). If we don’t think our shadowy desires can be met overtly, we will look to achieve them covertly. People pleasing in order to belong is a classic example. If you lie or play small, it’s a way to covertly make a person like you rather than risk rejection. If you avoid conflict or pretend not to be bothered, it hides the desire to express power in favor of the need to belong. Micro-deceits like this are so normal in some cultures we actually take them to mean good manners. In England, even if you’re overjoyed, the best way to connect to a stranger is to complain. If - like most Americans - you start with something positive, we will think you’re an idiot. How much of ourselves do we sacrifice to belong to others?

The desire to belong casts a long shadow; in that shadow lies a dark truth. The more you judge your desire, the bigger the lie you live to stop yourself acting it out. The less we accept our desire, the more inauthentically we behave to cover them up. In my twenties, I used to have a terrible fear of approaching women because I judged my desire as creepy. When I saw a girl I liked I would look at her across the room for ten minutes, then go home and hope to run into her three weeks later. Surprisingly this didn’t work, but for a decade I considered it perfectly sound behaviour because it was perfectly normal in England. Only when a bigger desire surfaced to find a partner could I shatter the inauthentic, adaptive need to belong. With family, friends, and society, we experience this inner vs outer conflict every day. Negation of our true selves creates friction, friction creates pain, and pain usually leads to therapy. 

Therapy is the place to accept who we really are by acknowledging how fucked up humanity really is. It’s where the lie we’re living to bury the uglier truth gets uncovered and goes to die. That’s why 99% of it is spent talking total bullshit in order to uncover the 1% uncomfortable truth. No matter who you are, or what your problem is, the answer is always the same. Non-acceptance of your life is the problem; when you realize it, it's suddenly not. No therapist will ever say this and paradoxically, it wouldn't help if they did. Instead a five-act play must be performed whereby Mum, Dad, the handsy Uncle, a shit boyfriend, or a dickhead boss need to be made the bad guys until the fiction ends. Therapy is thus the place we lie until finally we realise the truth.

So why do we suppress our truth in order to live a lie? Is it the urge to belong? Because drugs and alcohol benders are glorious? Or having an orgy with your neighbors is actually a terrible idea? All of these are true to some degree, but the uncomfortable problem with the truth is your power. Acknowledging the truth of your unwelcomed desires creates a terrible realisation: you’re not as good as you imagine yourself to be. And if you’re not good, how can you trust yourself to wield power without terrible results? This is the conundrum that all of us face and to varying degrees, all of us repress. If we accept our desire; we accept our power, and we must accept responsibility. But as you accept desire, your power grows and with it the knowledge of how tyrannical you can be. No tree’s branches grow to heaven without its roots first touching hell.

As the branches of personal power grow up and the roots of accountability grow down, another disturbing truth sets in: one way or another, desire gets what it wants. If we don’t consciously own it, subconsciously it will own us. If you’re creating the same toxic relationships,  subconsciously it's because you like to be treated poorly instead of consciously risking “no”. If you’re going broke paying for your friends, subconsciously you prefer the pain of poverty over the fear of truthful rejection. Overtly or covertly, consciously or subconsciously, your desires - perverse as they are - will be lived out however they need to be. God likes blow jobs and ice cream just as much as pain and bondage. The universe wants us to experience all, and God it would appear, is one kinky-assed mother fucker.

Taking ownership of all of our desires, and all of our lives, is a tough cookie to swallow because we create a lot of fucked up shit. Trauma, sexual abuse, illness, it’s hard to believe anyone but the world’s most messed up sociopath would want that, and paradoxically exactly why it’s true. The more horrible the life event, the harder it is to admit we created it. This is why perfectionists and trauma victims spend so much time in therapy. The first can’t accept any impure desires, the second can’t accept the level of impurity. But as fucked as it is, life is just as grotesque as it is profoundly beautiful. In the day to day we often accept this equation. Your phone gets stolen or a friend betrays your confidence, these are unpleasant though acceptable outcomes of shadow desires. But at the extremes humanity - war, illness, genocide - the logic that we could desire these things falls into the abyss. These events are so awful they must be suppressed into the unconscious. But all you need to do is look at the unmet needs of a situation to see the utility of its creation. There is deep pleasure in war (the desire to dominate) or illness (a call for love), they’re just subversive ways to go about it. As Jung said, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate.”

If this all sounds like gaslighting yourself into accepting you’re a bit of a monster, then the inner work can now begin. Paradoxically, acceptance of this fact makes for a great life. The drama we create to avoid our low level desires ultimately creates the events that force us to admit to them. Accepting them upfront just fast forwards the process. Strangely, once you accept this truth, you can really enjoy it. The benefits (and the perverse joy) of any difficult situation become realisable once the kinky desires that created it are obvious to see. This is why, when you really own the truth of a messy situation, you realise with some humour, you created it all to begin with. A dark, lovely part of your psyche buried it so you can enjoy the revelation later. Few of us are willing to acknowledge this though because it's embarrassing to admit how often we blow up our lives to get to the truth. Ironically though, it is these thresholds of death and rebirth when we are closest to who we really are. You’re never more honest with yourself than when your life is completely falling apart. Just ask anyone that’s gone through divorce. Every time, there’s a hidden desire to thank for it.

So celebrate your fucked-up-ness. Drop the mantras and the meditations. Sell your mala beads. Scrap limiting beliefs. It’s all resistance to owning the glorious narcissist shit pot that you are. Embrace your desire to dominate and be dominated. Run with open arms into your shame and see it dissolve like rain. Our deep, weird desires are here to stay and will never go away. And the next time you find yourself wrestling your impure desires, ask yourself: if the producers wanted Truman to stay in Seaview, why did they have a travel agent?