Reality Show

I consider myself a realist. As such, am I destined to live a life of relative disquiet? Apparently. Do all people consider themselves realists? Everyone necessarily has an individual version of reality, so who is to say which reality equals the real reality? All realities ring true for someone.
But can we come up with objective measures of reality? Men and women, for example, often perceive situations differently. Witnesses offer different takes on what they have seen. Certainly some circumstances lend themselves to reasonably objective interpretations; if someone threw a baseball through a window, and the window broke, and someone else said it didn't, you could say, "Bullshit, I just saw that fucking ball break the glass," and anyone else around likely would share your interpretation.
On the other hand, not every situation presents in such a fashion. My mother and I have quite different interpretations of certain (most) events, and even when we agree on what transpired, we disagree on why. I could say the same about other women with whom I've interacted. So I either for some reason interact with women who are predisposed to disagree with me, or most women have that predisposition, or I'm the one predisposed to disagree. Here I will acknowledge some culpability.
I also will concede that my perceptions, based on life experience, appear to deviate from the perceptions of people who have had less turbulent lives. Or, as my wife says, my normal isn't normal. Drinking, drugs, violence, depression, suicidal tendencies, electroconvulsive therapy all have skewed my perceptions. I have taken a while to come to that recognition. I bet not everyone knows somebody who has undergone ECT. But that's my reality, and I can't change it.
I can change how I process some of my experiences, so I guess our past doesn't have to hold a completely inexorable grip on the present. But that involves work and energy and an emotional investment and a willingness to make oneself vulnerable and to keep at it for years and years in my case before something clicks. Is that a way to spend a life? Although, the alternative looked grim, and final. Most people I've encountered don't have the inclination to change. As a result, no reason exists to investigate the formative experiences that have shaped who they are and how they got there. The path of least resistance apparently holds the most appeal. That's their reality, and they're sticking to it.
People lie, too, and in so doing further muddy the reality waters. For some people, the lies eventually become truth to them. If you tell a lie long enough....No wonder, then, that reconciling these disparate realities can prove elusive.
I've read, and I don't know where, that depression affects realists disproportionately. I guess it would. Which comes first, the realism or the depression? The way people cope might make the difference. I'm genetically predisposed, I think (maybe nurture played a part here), to wake up in the morning and for the most part decry daily life's drudgery. Paying bills and cutting the grass or shoveling the snow and getting the car inspected pretty much suck. Then you have to deal with the selfish dickheads who appear to exist to make other people's lives more difficult. Work holds little appeal. People who go to church on top of all this amaze me. Why not add one more shit-ass thing to do in a day/month/year filled with shit-ass things? I'll stop, since I run the risk of depressing anyone reading this.
But this is my reality. And I'm right, after all. And you can't run from your own head.