If you can’t tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell the truth about other people, you cannot know what is true and what it is not. You will most likely live in fear and confusion, as I did for so long, because you will never know when you are loved and safe, and when you are not. You cannot be healthy, and unhealthy people cannot ever have good relationships with healthy people.
it never feels good. It can’t work.
Anna Freud believed that severe anxiety – panic attacks, we call them now – occur when we lie to ourselves, the conscious and the subconscious become in conflict with one another. Our disconnected selves go to war, different realities fight within us. You can’t really lie to yourself, you can’t lie to your own soul and not suffer.
Five or six years ago, my life fell apart and I followed suit, and I was, for the first time, forced to confront the reality of myself. I was shocked and disappointed. I saw that I did not know myself, was not honest with myself or others, I didn’t really even know what honesty was, I had never really seen it.
Being honest is not free, it almost always comes with a price. Our culture is not built on honesty, but fear, anger and avoidance. When I finally went to get help, I was forced in therapy to confront the reality of me, my own loss of perspective, my inability to face the truth about myself or see the truth about others.
That is a hard way to live. I promised myself I would never go back to it, delusion very nearly killed me.
I am learning to be honest, it is a long road, I am getting there. This commitment has changed almost everything in my life. I am blessed to have shared this journey with Maria, we shared many of the same problems, we both suffered the most awful and crippling panic, self-doubt and fear. We both learned to see the truth about ourselves and face it, we learned to stand in our truth and protect ourselves.
As a writer, I knew I wasn’t being honest, I was too often writing fairy tales about myself, stories I wished to believe, but which turned out to not be true. It wasn’t that I was deliberately lying, it was that I didn’t really know what the truth was and did not dare to face it.
I decided to change that.
Maria was an enormous part of that, from the first we told the truth about each other, and we worked to find the truth about ourselves. When Maria told me she could never return to her art, and was devastated by that fear, I encouraged her to see that this was a lie. She was an artist, of course she could do her art, people would see it and appreciate it. The trouble was that she didn’t believe it, not that it wasn’t true. She didn’t know herself, she believed she was the person other people told her she was.
I had some of the same problems.
When I broke down in the middle of a book and decided I had to give up being a writer, she helped me to see that this was not true, this was my own confusion and panic talking, not the reality. I finished Rose In A Storm, one of my best books, and went on to do another book.
I started my blog. I have to say, my blog led me to honest. I have never knowingly lied on my blog, it has led me to truth and understanding in many ways.
The first thing I promised when I started my blog was to tell the truth, to be open. I promised myself – and my readers – that I would not protect anyone, including me, that I would share the bad as well as the good, my mistakes as well as my successes. Many people warned me not to do that, they assured me people would abandon me in droves if I was authentic about my life, nobody would want to read about it. They were wrong.
As I began to be honest about myself, people could see some of themselves in me. Our stories were different, but our trials and challenges were often the same. Honesty connects us to other people faster than Facebook.
I am no better than anyone reading this, there is nothing perfect about my life, and there is nothing perfect about anybody else’s either. We are all searching, that became our bond and our community. It was not the end of my life as a writer, it was really the beginning in many ways.
I appreciate the years of hard and grueling therapy, my therapist was strong and fearless, I could never bully, charm or evade her. I certainly couldn’t lie to her. She challenged me with observations about my avoidance, deceptions and delusions. It wasn’t that I was a bad man, she said, I was anxious to be a good man.
I just had not learned the truth about myself.
So that became an integral part of my work, and I am still at it. It is one of the most important things for me in my life, a major step in my hero journey. It led to my photography – pictures help me see the world clearly and truthfully. It led to love, honesty helped Maria to trust me, and me her. Neither of us has ever really trusted anyone.
Honesty led to an outpouring of creativity that is never a struggle, always a joy. Honesty is liberating, I have nothing to hide, from you or myself. There is nothing anyone can say about me that I don’t know or have not acknowledged. That frees up a lot of energy.
I am learning to be honest with myself, and thus, with others. I know that does not always make me popular, but it always feels right. One of the big shocks about trying to be honest is that being honest feels good, it feels pure, it is a release of hiding and deception and guilt. It is the literal opposite of being dishonest, of hiding. My writing has helped me see the truth, it guides me and leads me and keeps me honest. I often do not know the truth until I write it, I wouldn’t dare use it to lie.
Being honest is not a simple or easy thing to do, I think most people do not care to try to do it, it can be too painful and confusing. In one way, we live in a world of lies, the systems in which we live – political, corporate, climate, medical, family – often depend on our not telling the truth. No one in our world can be honest all the time and survive.
Being honest is a choice, a way of life, a path. It is a belief system. If you are careless with the truth in small things, you will become careless with the bigger ones, especially about yourself. I learned to lie for many years, not I am learning to tell the truth. If I can do one, I can do the other.
A student in a writing class a few years ago came to me with a story about her mother, with whom she had a difficult and painful relationship.
She wrote about her mother, and her mother’s death, but it was a loving and idyllic representation, there was none of the pain, conflict and confusion that she had told me about. It was not true. Why are writing this fairy tale?, I asked.
She didn’t want anyone she knew to read it, she said.
I told her she should not ever use her writing to protect someone or write false stories about her life. She could write about something else or tell the truth. If she could not be honest in her writing, how could she be honest in her life? Writing is a sacred contract between the writer and the reader. If you are authentic, you will hurt and upset some people, but you will end up believing in yourself.
I know Maria feels this way about her art, and we have held one another’s hand as we move into our lives and follow our hearts.
Gandhi said to believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest. The writer Jenny O’Connell wrote that hiding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn’t make you nice, it just makes you another kind of liar.
And lying never feels nearly as good as being honest.
