A close friend of mine is getting married at the weekend. I’m invited, but it would require an 11-hour plane journey followed by a six-hour drive just to get to the venue. She understands the impossibility of the ask, and it’s all okay. I’ve promised her that I’ll make it to the next one.

Still, it’s frustrating. I consider myself the sort of person who would move heaven and earth for my friends – who would happily tear up their schedule and destroy their body clock to make an unlikely appearance at a wedding in Walla Walla, WA.

Unfortunately, I no longer behave like this sort of person. I want to. It’s just that my personal circumstances make it impossible.

There’s an obvious flaw in this narrative; namely, that these circumstances are all the result of my own decision-making. I chose this life, this location, this line of work, this Laura, and our little one. And these choices dictate that I can’t jet over to the other side of the world for my friends, regardless of the occasion or my personal FOMO.

Another close friend recently opened for the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park. It was by far the biggest performance of his life, and I missed it. Another close friend has a three-year-old daughter I still haven’t met. At least, I think she’s three.

So I continue to tell myself the same story: that I would do anything for my friends. But deep down, I know that this omits all manner of caveats and conditions contained in the small print. I would do anything for friends (but I won’t do that).

Before I beat myself up too much, it’s worth acknowledging the impossibility of encapsulating the totality of human experience in the stories we tell about ourselves – i.e. what it means to be us at any given moment.

For example, I can tell you that I’m not a food lover, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never enjoyed a meal or that I’m entirely disinterested in patronising nice restaurants. Or I can tell you how much I enjoy air travel, a sentiment which almost certainly won’t be relevant if my plane starts nose-diving towards the Indian Ocean.

What’s more, the role of fiction appears to be almost as important as fact in the stories we tell. Rarely do we acknowledge the disparity between who we claim we are and how we actually spend our time.

The person who purports to love live music but never goes to see any shows. The person who tells us they love to explore the world yet holidays annually in the same location. The person who claims that family is everything but never sees their family.

Are these people liars? That seems harsh. Perhaps the truth is so dispiriting at times that we all feel obliged to augment our understanding of who we are with a sense of who we aspire to be, or who we believe we’d be if life didn’t keep getting in the way. As Michael Stipe once sang, “We all invent ourselves. And, uh, you know me.”

I’ve decided that all of this is fine. Mildly delusional, but fine. Necessity is the mother of invention, and our partially fabricated, somewhat inaccurate and incomplete stories strike me as necessarily delusional.

But we should be mindful that we don’t slip further into the realm of self-delusion and start to draw too heavily upon stories of old that no longer correlate with our present selves.

Telling ourselves that we love to travel when we no longer love to travel is a recipe for dubious decision-making. And telling someone else that we love to travel, when we don’t, is a waste of everybody’s time.

Then again, telling someone that while we used to love travelling, what we now love is sitting in front of the TV watching Love Island while endlessly scrolling through social media sounds like a frank acknowledgement that our best days, and our best selves, are behind us.

Maybe it’s better to embrace the delusion than admit what we’ve become.

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash