I watched the most fascinating documentary the other night. It's called Misha and the Wolves and it's about a woman who walked to Germany, through Belgium, as a very small child, looking for her parents taken by the Nazis in WW2. She befriended a wolf who brought her into its pack and she lived with them, the wolves, in the wild. She was interviewed all over the world, her memoir a best seller. A movie was made about her. Misha and the Wolves.
But, it wasn't true. The story wasn't true.
And here's the most interesting part of it, the part that has burrowed into me and stayed deep: she believed it was true.
For her, it was true.
It's not madness, delusion that caused her to believe in her story. It was, as she said, the only way to survive her life. I won't tell you the twist, who she really was, in hope you find and experience the film for yourself.
She believed it was true. You could see it in her eyes, feel it in her words, in every single interview they showed. For her, that was her reality. It poured out of her and was mesmerizing.
I lay in bed afterwards with my cup of tea and thought about all the stories we tell ourselves. All of the stories I tell myself. Of all the things I believe to be true and if they really are.
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I need to see this. That interests me a lot. I was someone who was never good at school until my senior year of high school when I finally got to take courses in psychology and sociology, because I looked at them like screenwriting courses, …diving deep into cultures, personalities, traumas etc. This just totally satisfies that interest.