Dakota Skye

I just watched the movie Dakota Skye. It’s about this teenage chick who has the ability to know when people are lying and, what’s more, to know the truth. She is “involuntarily blessed with what everyone else spends their entire lives trying to find,” as she puts it.

The movie was a little weird, but I liked it. It went for that edgy, artsy, memoir feel, which I appreciated.

At one point Dakota is standing at the top of a cliff with someone who asks “if you were to jump off this cliff, would you rather hit the ground facing down or facing up? Would you rather face down the whole time and see then end coming, or face up staring at the sky so you never know when the end is coming?”

I wrestled with that question the entire movie (which was kind of the point, as that was the underlying thought process of Dakota).

A great deal of my life has been chock full of fake.

“How are you?” (Truth: I don’t even remember your name but I’m going to smile and ask and hope you lie right back to me.)

“I’m great, thanks!” (Truth: I’m getting divorced and my children hate me. I think I might kill myself tonight. But I don’t think you have any clue who I am, so I’m going to smile and lie to your face and hope you walk away soon.)

It happens. We call it being polite. It’s what we do. Whatever.

I mean, do we really want to know anyway? Are we willing to get that vested in another person? Let’s face it, most of us aren’t.

When you walk up to order coffee and inadvertently ask “how are you?” and before you can skip ahead to “I’d like a grande latte” do you really want to hear “well I woke up kind of depressed because there’s just so much I hate about my job and I just went through a break up, but the weather is fairly pleasant today so I’m in a better mood. What can I get for you today?”

So maybe the fake questions and the fake answers are just best.

Personally, I always want to know. I want to know the truth because I’m so used to being lied to that it’s pathetic and has made me cynical and bitter. My whole life I have always thought it better to know. Even as a child, I begged for truth. I asked my mom if Santa Claus was real. Her diplomatic response was something like “well honey some people chose to believe in him and if you want to that’s okay.”

“Mom, really, I don’t care. I just want to know the truth.” I swear to God I was probably four years old.

I have always thought it better to know.

Until recently someone decided to spew random personal information and for the first time in my life, I thought “now there’s something I would have been better off not knowing.” Irony at its finest moment.

Even still, in retrospect, I changed my mind. Because that one piece of truth opened my eyes to so much else that I needed to know and to realize in order to see the whole picture. Was it a picture I liked? Is that what I selfishly wanted to believe as truth? No way. Not at all. But would I rather know? Absolutely. I will jump off that cliff facing the ground.

And isn’t it odd how one bit of truth can shine light on a whole scene we never knew excited. One truth always reveals more than a single fact. Honestly, it’s usually not the single fact that fazes me so much as what it implies, what all it reveals, the deeper truths it unveils. Those things, the deeper things, are what cause paradigm shifts.

Sometimes the truth sucks. But I’d choose it every time. Because at the end of the day, at some point, fake always crumbles, it fades, it gets found out. And quite frankly, it gets old and weary and transparent. And there is nothing worse than someone who is so transparently fake.

It is what it is.

I chose to jump facing down.