Living in The Blur

A lot of things happened last night, and it only makes sense for me to make note of them. My mother went to her first mediation session yesterday, and it lasted for the majority of the day.

 It went surprisingly well, actually. To compress a lot of legal jargon that I don't fully understand, my mother has full custody and he'll be paying us child/partner support, along with alimony. Which is fabulous, to be blunt. While celebrating last night, we talked a lot about topics we've already gone over. One of them being why the three of us did such a "180" when we got back from our road trip, back in the Spring. Considering the fact that we moved out almost immediately after we came back. It certainly looks bad; two impressionable young ladies, left alone for a week with their mother and returning visibly anti-dad. 

My mother is concerned about it too, always asking if she had actually "brain washed" us, as my father constantly claims. It took me a while, but I came up with a decent way to reassure her. 

There's a very famous painting, "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat. It's almost entirely comprised of blurred paint dots, but you don't realize this until you zoom in on the painting.

The problem is, if you zoom in too much, it's nothing. A meaningless blur of colored dots, that make no discernible shape. You still have a vague idea as to what the painting is about, but you are focused, and can only comprehend the blur in front of you. 

For me, the years before this Spring, I was living in that blur. I had a vague idea of the rest of the big picture- I knew it wasn't supposed to be like this, that regular father's didn't act like that, but I was too centered on that blur of my life, that I didn't bother. It took a big event, like driving to the other end of a country, to really get some perspective. It took being so disconnected from it all; away from my father, from my house, from the familiarity and the facade that we all struggled so hard to preserve- it took all of that for me to be able to "zoom out", and see the painting for it's entirety. 

My father, as I've undoubtedly mentioned before, is a charming man when he wants to be. He's also so fake, he almost has, quite literally, two faces. My entire family took our cue from that public face of his, from the laughter and jokes and smiles that he gave. We all followed his lead and acted in the capacity of charming American family, with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog. That's how we acted. 

And that's why everyone is so surprised, these days, to learn that our family wasn't so picturesque. 

And it's taken me a long while, but I'm starting to realize that no lives are picturesque, no matter how cinematic and lovely they may seem at first glance. So when I pass the girls I wish I looked like in the street, or see the scowling adults in their office clothes, I try to imagine their lives, and all the ways it could be so complex, and corrupted, and wrong. All the things that happen to them that I'll never know. Because that sort of thinking keeps me grounded. It drags me out of my typical self-centered reality, and it helps me realize that life is weird and strange and intriguing and confusing and kind of amazing sometimes. 

I'm starting to live outside of the blur; not only the blur of my own reality, but the blur of life in general, I think. I'm trying to see other's by zooming out, and I hope I'll be able to.