Reframing Reality by Gillian

Many things can force us to reframe our reality; death of a loved one, divorce, health problems, loss of a job or change in career, relocating our home, addictions and substance abuse. The list goes on and on. And the reasons don’t have to be negative. Winning the lottery could certainly reframe reality, as could falling madly in love or escaping from addictions and substance abuse.

But the extent to which you allow your reality to change when such things happen, I believe, depends very much on how secure you are with your own reality, and your place in it. Possibly I am being hopelessly naive, but I really think I could find myself the lucky recipient of, say, fifty million bucks, without it changing me very much. I think I could face health problems, or being forced, for whatever reason, to live in some other State or even country, and survive it without allowing my reality to morph to too great an extent. Of course I’m kinda sticking my neck out here, inviting all of you to judge me eagerly when one of these happenings does befall me. But at least my own reaction to these things is something that is within my control, though whether I do in fact master it may be another matter.

What I have little, if any, control of, is how something which happens to me, ends up reframing another person’s, or many other people’s, realities around me. When I win that fifty million, you know it changes me in other people’s realities. The same happens if, say, I am diagnosed with a terminal illness and given six weeks to live. Does that cause others to reframe me in their realities? You bet it does.

One of the strongest effectors of reality change in a person and in those around them is probably addiction and substance abuse, whichever direction those nightmares are moving. If we fall under the influence of an addiction, it certainly changes our vision, our very sense, of reality. All else becomes less and less real; the only thing real to us is that addiction. Likewise, it is all others see of us. Our entire reality, to our families and friends, is taken over by the addiction. If we continue, our frame of reality both to ourselves and others, is the addiction.

Ah, but we have made the miracle happen. We are recovering from substance abuse. So all will be well, will it not? We don’t fool ourselves. How many relationships have we seen disintegrate well into the recovery stage? All those friends, family members, perhaps partners, who had been been accompanying us happily down Addiction Road no longer find us fun. We no longer share that costly habit; that dark secret. As we fade in their realities to mere echoes of our former selves, we are dealing, ourselves, with the formation of very new realities. We are mere echoes of our former selves to ourselves, also, and must begin the challenge of creating for ourselves a completely new reality which maybe we have never known, or at least forgotten.

Well we can’t let this topic go without at least dipping our toes into the Coming Out Ocean, can we? When I first came out, just to myself, I felt a huge shift in reality. Or more, it seemed that my previous reality had simply disintegrated, pffff, in an unimpressive little puff of steam like some things do on the computer when you press delete. I had no concept of what my new reality looked like. I was an explorer alone in a newly discovered land: a time-traveller.

It took coming out to others to begin to frame this new reality, and for those others to reframe their own, with the new me in it. But as we stumbled along together, my family, friends, and I, we /found that, at least superficially, not so much reframing was required after all. I was still the same person. Little had really changed.

Oh but it had.

Oprah Winfrey has spiritual gurus on her TV channel on Sundays, part of a series she terms Super Soul Sundays. Watching one of these one morning I heard an expression that summed up the state of my soul to perfection. Oprah, or her guest whose name I don’t even recall, used the phrase homesickness of the soul.

“Yes, oh yes, that is it exactly!”  I wanted to yell and dance and shout for joy. Yes, that is it.

Before I came out to myself with true, complete, unquestioning acceptance of who I was, my soul was terribly, agonizingly homesick. Now it am home. My soul and I came home. We are where we live; where we must be. What we were born to be.

That is what now frames my reality, and no matter what happens it will never change.

Perhaps that is why I dare to think, in a way that maybe seems rather smug, that my reality will not falter in the unlikely event of suddenly having undreamed of wealth, or, sadly somewhat higher odds, being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The only really important reality is my soul, and it has come home.

© June 2014 

About the Author  

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.