Isn’t it weird what we lie about? For me, I am pretty honest about most things. Big stuff. Details. Where I still have trouble is in relationships with other where I am still trying to manipulate the way they see me. I want to appear cooler, or better, or something other than I am...so I lie. I have been doing it so long, that I don’t even realize that I am doing it a great deal of the time. I might lie about a detail that didn’t go down the way that I say it did. Or lie about how I feel, that is probably the place that I lie the most.
I grew up believing that my feelings needed to be filtered, softened, weeded through before they were shared with another. Part of this is just how I am wired and a great deal more a product of my experiences growing up. I learned that you could really manipulate life to suit you, or at least minimize consequences, by lying about who you really were. And once the lying started, it was all down hill from there.
I would give myself a 92% today. I tell the truth 92% of the time. Most of the 8% that I still do, is mostly to myself about things that I talk to myself about...I am never sure how to walk the line between keeping something private and unshared and lying lies...seems like a hard line to distinguish for me. I have a lot of things that I think and feel that I do not want you to know. Still.
So I have some work to do with honesty. And even if I dedicated the rest of my life to getting honest I doubt I would ever get to 100%...but that doesn’t mean that I can stop trying. The effort to reach a target that is unreachable is still a worthy target. I am not likely to attain enlightenment either...but I am going to keep at it.
I guess what I lack more than anything on the truth telling front is a level of acceptance of myself that I feel I can truly share. There is always an element of hiding that I still feel like I want to do. Motives. Thoughts. Ideas. Feelings. Things that I do not want to share because I do not want to hurt the other person. Or because I do not want to be hurt. Or because I do not want to create a shitshow in my life. And if I am really honest, I do not want to deal with the emotional upheaval of another because I do not want my peaceful life disrupted with the other person’s messy emotional carnage. I would rather keep silent and miss the fray. Chicken, I know but I often find that I just don’t have the energy.
So while some days that 8% really kicks my ass, I have to remember that I came from a place where I told the truth about 11% of the time. I truly did not know fact from fiction...it was just lie after lie after lie. Mostly about where I was, what I was doing and who I was doing it with...because chances were that I was NOT behaving in a manner that was respectful or really safe.
So I have to be grateful for the progress. 81% progress. And it has only taken 26 years...LOL. And I am gonna keep going...trying to work towards the 100% even if I know that I am not going to get there. I know where the work on lying lies, getting free from the idea that the truth will prevent me from getting something I want, or losing something I have. The more I can become unmoored from that - moved away from that, the more truth will spill from my lips. Because I can trust and believe that the truth is the only thing that will ever, truly, set me free.
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