Cracked Lenses by L J McIntyre

Author:L J McIntyre [McIntyre, L J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty One: Three Years Later

Jack Coulson: Session Five

“Let’s talk about your degree, Jack,” Paul said. Today he wore brown sandals that distracted me because they were so bloody ugly.

“My degree? What do you want to know?”

“You said you gave up writing after your degree because one of your short stories was rejected.”

“Shouldn’t we be talking more about my dad, instead? Isn’t he the reason why I am the way I am?”

“Of course we should talk about your dad. That’s why I’m asking you about your degree.”

“Okay, so yeah, that’s why I gave up writing.”

“I’m curious, didn’t you ever fail an essay at university?”

“Yeah, once.”

“When that happened, did it affect you the same way as your short story rejection?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“They were different.”

“Different how?”

“Well, you know, everyone got bad grades at university sometimes. And education is structured. The lecturers had a job to do. I was just another student, just another essay to mark.”

“And the person from the magazine who rejected your short story, were they doing their job?” He scratched his ear, searched my eyes with his.

“It felt more personal. What are you getting at?”

Paul went for his trademark move, dusted off his glasses on the sleeve of his brown jumper. I folded my arms and eyed him.

“Last session you said you were who you were. That you are hardwired to be the way you are. And yet, you faced the same type of rejection in two different situations but reacted entirely differently to each one.”

He placed his glass back on.

“Can’t I be hardwired to respond differently to different situations?”

“When you say ‘hardwired’ do you mean your DNA is encoded in a particular way that caused you to respond differently?”

I nodded.

“It seems very unlikely to me.”

“How?” I asked.

“Well, our DNA is the result of a very long evolutionary journey, but one that more or less stopped a quarter of a million years ago. The makeup of our DNA is pretty much identical to the DNA of the first modern humans.”

I sat forward, started tapping my foot. “Where’s this going?”

He crossed his legs. “It means that we don’t have a gene that recognises universities and magazines, and then tells us how to behave accordingly. There were none of those modern institutions back when humans first walked the Earth. You reacted to each rejection differently because of how you perceived each situation. ”

“So what?”

He clasped his hands together, almost as if he were praying. “Perceptions are fluid, changeable. This is the evidence that you are not necessarily hardwired to be who you think you are. You can change. You can see the world differently and behave differently. You are not just your genes.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried to change?” I stood up and walked to a window.

“Please look at me, Jack.”

I turned around.

“Can you give me one example of when you’ve been confrontational in the last…I don’t know…five years.”

“I haven’t.”

“Not once?”

“No.”

“How about two weeks ago when you shouted at me. Was that not confrontational?”

“That was different.”

“How?”

“It just fucking was, okay. And I don’t want to be a confrontational arsehole like my dad.

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