Self-Esteem
There is nothing quite so desolating as failure — feeling wounded in one’s self-esteem and succumbing to the tough, relentless discouragement of having let down a fellow human being who needed help, and not having known how to give it. One thing is the apparent logic of events; quite another is the human element that every relationship with your fellow man carries within it.
And not all of us are prepared, or know how, to gauge the impact our words, our actions, or our silences can have on others. Sometimes the arrogance of believing oneself infallible or intellectually superior makes us cruel through insensitivity — or through a blindness born of possessing absolute truth — and without knowing it, we are headed for irreversible ruin.
What we speak of here, beneath its carefully crafted surface — which combines nostalgia, the anguish of memory (and its loss), the trafficking between reality and fiction — is a sharp portrait of learning: not the exclusive province of children or the young, but something we remain capable of at any age, at any moment, even in the final stretch of our existence. Several narratives interweave, all of them entangled, unfolding at different moments, yet all contributing to the lesson of learning from mistakes so that we might become more human, more compassionate, more content.
It is a fiction built upon another fiction, like a delicate game of mirrors, where the story reflects on how we construct our own character — and how others construct it for us — until in the end we no longer know if we are who we believe ourselves to be, or if we are simply performing the fantasy others expect of us. To correct course is the mark of wisdom, and second chances, sometimes, carry the virtue of redemption — because even if we cannot rewrite our past, we can at least become the masters of our present.
Dedicated to Johanna.
CARLOS. 07/10/2019