Stories We Tell Ourselves

This I believe to be true: the Titanic will not stay sunk, and the Russian Imperial Family will not stay dead. We love these stories. I finished reading THE ROMANOV’S, by Robert Massie, and although I was intrigued by the bones of the murdered Tsar and his family being found, what really fascinated me was the story of Anna Anderson.

You don’t know Anna Anderson? Ok, listen up: Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered in 1918, in Russia. In 1920, a woman jumped into a canal in Berlin, was rescued by a policeman, and taken to a hospital. She had no identification, no papers, and she would not speak. She was taken to a mental asylum where she spent two years.

Here’s the interesting part. People told her that she resembled Anastasia, the Grand Duchess and fourth daughter of Tsar Nicolas II. She began to act  like Anastasia and began, I think, to believe that she was Anastasia. For 64 years she lived in a world of controversy. Did someone escape the horrific massacre in Ekaterinburg? Had one of the daughters been rescued by a sympathetic executioner? Part of the surviving Romanov family embraced her, part thought she was a sham. Anna Anderson lived on the charity of the Romanov family and wannabe believers for 64 years, until she died in 1984.

In the early 1990’s, after a long court battle, Anna Anderson’s DNA was tested. Big surprise. Anna Anderson was not the Grand Duchess, nor was she a Romanov. Heck, she wasn’t even Russian. She was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Prussian peasant, a nobody. But she didn’t die a nobody. She was the center of a life that she ultimately made up.

Anna Anderson began by stating that she was someone else, and she stated it enough times that I think she came to believe it. She became another person, with another and more interesting background. I find it astonishing that she clung to that belief for 64 years. That’s a long time to believe a lie. But the brain, really, is stupid. Your brain will believe anything you tell it. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t judge. It accepts what you tell it day in and day out. Too fat? Too short? No talent? Bad mother? Loser? Your brain doesn’t care. What lie might you be believing about yourself?

If you tell yourself that you have talent, that you are a kind person, that you manage money well, that you are articulate…………..might you also believe that, if repeated enough? Might you also move better and more often if you tell yourself that it is not your age that is keeping you from moving. You don’t move well because you don’t move. Try moving more. Your brain will thank you, and it will age you less.

That’s Aging Intelligently.