The Lance in all of us

Much to my amazement I watched the 1st part of the 2 part interview that Lance Armstrong did with Oprah Winfrey. There was a reason that I sacrificed watching my reality shows for this. To be honest, I couldn’t really care less whether Lance had doped or not. I’m not really a cycling enthusiast and outside of the fact that he was the face of the yellow wristband, and had been through the viciousness called cancer I had never paid too much attention to the goings-on in his life mine kept me busy enough. I simply wanted to understand the story behind the story. I was curious about 2 things – why had he held on to the lie for so long and why was he coming out to tell the truth now? I passively listened to his admission of many of the facts that we’d already heard about but intently honed in on the screen as he spoke about why he lied and what it felt like to be living a lie. I’m not in the business of playing the guessing game at what really lies in the heart of man so it is not my place to determine whether or not his admission was borne out of the selfishness to garner sympathy or whether it was good old altruism in motion. I am in the business of saying how I feel however and I will say I felt a deep compassion for him as the unravelling of Lance Armstrong continued. He talked about how the same drive and determination to beat cancer also meandered its way into beating other competitors (never mind for now that he was doping before the illness), how as he built this lie it became his truth, how he didn’t feel he was cheating by doping and when finally he was almost ousted he figured that the story had been so perfect that he wanted to keep it that way. I realized then that I wasn’t watching just Lance Armstrong but I was watching any one that claims to be human. How often do we often start up with insecurities that cause us to reject the notion of overcoming and instead illuminate only the weaknesses in us whilst using our strengths in  the most vile and corrupt ways. We build these stories that we want the world to see about our families, finances, careers, lifestyles; stories about us that seem too good to be true because they are. We then perpetuate this stench by betraying our inner man as well as others in this selfish and futile attempt to ensure that this story becomes oh so real. As Mr Armstrong alluded to he is deeply flawed- and might I add just like the rest of us. I encourage you today to embrace your flaws, channel your strengths wisely, uncover the inner man and listen to him knowing that the story that you tell may not be picture perfect but in the end gives you peace.