Accelerated Adolescence

What is Reality

Sometimes, the truth of your situation is clear. What you see is what you get and what you get is a product of what you see. In that case, reality is consistent. Other times what you see is not what you get and what you see and what you get are both entirely different from what you expected. Sometimes, we get a mixture, you get what you see and not expected and sometimes, you get what you expected, though are puzzled by how it came out right.
In a sense, if what you see and what you get and what you expect are constantly in disagreement, the world labels you as schizophrenic. Yet, we are all schizophrenic to some degree. What we expect is often not what we see. Most of us are delusional, we believe in a fair world. We have assumptions about how things work, how people react to certain situations, what it feels like to be attacked, loved, hurt, scorned. But, then, every now and again, we find ourselves in a situation that is so intolerably different from our core beliefs that we experience a metaphorical shattering of these assumptions. After our experience we can no longer believe or experience or expect the same things from the world. These experiences are violent and traumatic by nature (hence the shattering). They need not be physical, though they may be. A good student failing an exam or course, a successful business person suddenly finding him or herself bankrupt, going through a divorce, being the target of a racial slur, all of these are examples of violence. The issue is not a matter of "How bad was it?" but a matter of "Which assumptions were shattered?"
More to the point, which false beliefs were no longer tolerated by what you see and get? Rather than being shattered, is it possible that flexible beliefs were snapped into a rigid position taking on a new and different shape simply because your experience with reality has shed light on the erroneousness of your previous feelings? I think that we experience both in the face of new and challenging situations and, as the memo at the top of my blog reminds you, I seem to be experiencing these situations at a rate that I consider frequent. There is a logical conclusion that can be drawn from this passage of ambiguity, but I won't give it to the reader. Perhaps you can infer on your own the description at which I am hinting, then go look it up in the dictionary, break it down to its roots, and have a vague intellectual concept of what I'm talking around.