Joe Blog #13: Truth.

I will get in front of my own failures at truth, right from the outset.  I have been more of a withholder of truth than I have been a manufacturer of truth.  Not that I haven’t, from time to time, laid down some pretty creative narratives that have absolutely nothing to do with veracity. And of course, the biggest lies I have ever told have been to myself...about myself or a man.  Always.

I think truth is something that I felt was the up-ender of relationships.  For some reason, well for one very specific reason, I learned early on in life that you were supposed to keep secrets.  And even though I didn’t want to, I did.  And then secret keeping became the only way I think I could feel safe. The safety was in the lying or denying or distancing myself from the things that were too hard to admit, to hold or survive.

So I lied a lot.  And when you are a partier and alcoholic, lying is just part of the game you have to play so you can keep drinking.  The lying is what gives you permission and the space to get fucked on the regular (and yes, I mean that literally and figuratively).  You have to lie so that you can keep up doing what you are doing.  Only in the very end of life does an alcoholic no longer care what you know.  The need to manipulate and control you or your thoughts about them and what they are doing, finally prove too much to manage anymore and so the stark barren truth of addiction is laid bare.

Luckily for me, I figured that out long ago and I can see my sober journey as one where I have really worked at truth finding and telling.  It has not been a straight path.  But I feel like today I have comprehension and ability to tell the truth.  An that is in large part because when I’m sober, I am not out there creating the havoc I used to, so therefore there is a lot less to lie about.

So I will claim an ever evolving acquaintance with the truth.  It is an intimacy I work on daily.  There are many times that I do not want to let someone in on something I have done, thought, said or forgotten to do.  But today, it is so much easier just to get in front of whatever it is rather than complicate it to a point of relational annihilation.  Over the years, the truth has just gotten easier to tell.  And that is mostly due to me realizing and becoming willing to not pay the high cost of lying.

Today my life is pretty simple and uncomplicated.  There is just no reason to lie.  How I show up is pretty much how I am so there is no incongruence that needs to be explained or hidden.  My life feels pretty authentic and genuine.  Which when you feel that way about the way you are living, it is easy to tell the truth about it, even though, perhaps, the truths told are unexciting and banal.

If there is one area of my life that I still feel quite protective and defensive about it is men and dating.  This would be the area if I was going to lie, that I would be tempted.  And if I am really honest, it is because this area of my life still remains so unsettled.  This appears to be the final frontier for me.  A place where I have had a lot of interest but not a great deal of success.  And I guess, now that I am writing about it, I have some shame attached to this.  I guess I feel badly that I haven’t been more partnerable.  How much I have chosen a path that has made relating and committing harder for me.  I see others do it with impunity but my past and traumas and intellect have all worked in conflict with each other so as to provide me with a love life that has been full of conflicted feelings, near misses, and a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding.

But, like all other aspects of my life, truth has been the clarifying agent.  Me getting honest with me, about my issues, my pain and loss and traumas has gone a long way towards helping me walk the hard worn path of truth.  I gain insight and interest and assistance when I just let the truth fly and land where it may.  Sure, sometimes it makes people leave, but in the end, I can see those people were not meant to remain.  Their stay in my life short lived and temporary.

It has taken me a long time to arrive at the truth of my existence.  The things I do well, the things I don’t and the real feeling that somehow I need to hide both of those has had to live a million deaths.  My urge to lie and obfuscate my truer inner feelings and thoughts, had to finally convince me that I was no longer in peril and that it was safe enough to let the truth fly.

For me, personal safety was a prerequisite to truth telling.  When I feel unsafe, in fear or in danger, I will say anything to get myself out of it.  And this is not just me, I know most people lie when in fear.  And the fear can be real or imagined.  It doesn’t matter really.  Fear is always the thing that erodes my commitment to owning the truth.

The more safe I feel in life, in a relationship, in myself, the easier it is to access my truth and then share that with another.  When I was out there throwing myself into harm’s way all the time, I couldn’t really get at any kind of truth.  So delusion supplanted reality and the lies proliferated.  

Today, I do my best to show up in the skin I am in and tell the truth.  First and foremost to myself, and then to others (most especially to the men I date).  Showing them I am a safe person to be around who has more than a mere passing acquaintance with veracity.  And in attempting to make others feel safer to let their truth fly, I have created a space that is inviting and welcoming and safe for myself also. Lying is always a short term gain, long term pain kinda deal. And I stopped cutting those particular bad deals a long time ago. And finally learned that without truth, there can never be any trust.

The truth be told?  

Yes, as often as I can.

Again...still.

Always.