I had an epiphany the other day. I was trying to describe this feeling of confusion about my life to my friend and all of the sudden I recalled a movie I saw a million years ago. The Truman Show. 

(Spoiler alert ahead in case you had planned to watch this movie and hadn't found time in the last 25 years to fit it in....)

I don't know if you saw it, but it's a movie about a TV show. It starts when the star, Truman, is born. He grows up his whole life on the show, in front of cameras. The thing is, Truman doesn't know he's on the TV show. He's just living life. He tales his first steps on TV and the nation is riveted.  He goes on his first date. He plays games and goes to school. He gets a job.
Meanwhile, there are Actors playing his neighbor and his schoolmates. Actors playing the news delivery boy. His mama is an actor.  Even an actor who his wife. She kisses him every morning. She fixes him coffee while smiling at the hidden camera.  He's just going about his life living it. He thinks they have a real relationship. He thinks she loves him. And hes just doing boring life, Not realizing it's all a lie.
Occasionally a piece of the fake sky will fall to the ground and he'll think, that's weird. Or a protester who sees just how dangerous this is to his mental health will break onto the set to try to free him and security will create a diversion or Truman will glance and say, "crazy man!" But there are red flags and he just.doesnt see them.  Then one day, somebody shows him the truth. And he is in deep denial  but then he starts to see it all unfold. And he is SO LOST. And the world is watching him discover his truth and question his whole life.

I think this is what we are. We are Truman.

We have huge red flags that we ignore because we had no reason to suspect that the sky was fake or to believe the crazy man with their crazy claims was actually the only sane person we had met. But something jars us out of the make believe world we were living in and we are suddenly looking around wondering what parts of this life weve been living are real- is the SKY EVEN REAL???  We find out the truth and then the confusion sets in. It sends you into a tailspin. We don't know who in our lives are actors and who are truth-tellers. Which of the people we meet are other Trumans who are just as oblivious and which are actors who were in on the deception the whole time. I think about that a lot. When i think about sitting in a room with just my neighbor and my husband and me and thinking about the fact that there were 2 people in that room that knew more about my marriage than I did. For me, my neighbor was also an actor, because he was in on it with my husband. He knew I was living a fake life.  But who else was there? Who else was an actor? Were there more that knew I was living a lie and never told me? Certainly my husband did. What parts of my life are real? Were the vacations real? Or the times we did kiss?

Even when Truman tries to escape his made up world, he finally thinks he's free and sets sail into the horizon on a boat only to have the boat slam into a wall. Because there was no horizon.  He's still inside the bubble.  The horizon is an illusion, too. He can't figure how to escape it when it's all he's ever known.  He almost Gave up- just getting to that wall was HARD and took everything he had and it wasn't enough to get him out.

But then he saw a doorknob and hidden door painted innocuously into the wall to look like sky. And he opened it, turned around, said goodbye and walked through it, walking away from everything he had known, with a smile on his face, to claim his own real life.

I think I may go watch the movie again...

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One of the opening quotes of the movie:
"It's all true. It's all real. Nothing here is fake. Nothing you see on this show is fake. It's merely controlled..."