What Happened to the Truth?

I am really not sure.  I have not always been honest.  When I was drinking, I lied, a lot.  But my journey in sobriety has been an ever evolving intimacy with truth.  Today, I tell the truth most of the time.  I may not tell everyone everything but that is called discretion.  Not everyone in my life is entitled to know EVERYTHING about me.  

When I started this blog almost five years ago, I did it to be accountable for truths I was too afraid to tell.  And for the most part, those are personal truths about how I feel, why I feel that way and what I really think and feel.  I am honest about where I am, who I am with, what I am doing and why.  I do not have issue with that anymore, when you live according to spiritual principles, the need for those types of lies just evaporate.  I am not doing shady shit anymore so there is no reason for lying.

I have had a harder time telling the truth about my feelings.  When you hurt me, how you hurt me, what I can’t give you, what I wish I could but can’t.  These are things I have lied about a lot.  Holding back my own truth so as not to ruin the moment.  Even though your lies and deceit likely already ruined the moment long ago.  I have been very bad about calling you out on your shit, because I didn’t want to deal with the repercussions a truth would bring to bear on the situation.

And all lies are designed to manipulate.  To alter the reality of someone else so that you can continue to do what you want, or you can take your leave and do what you want over there with little interruption or inconvenience.  I get it.  But I will tell you living the past two years with a compulsive liar, two teens who have an often loose acquaintance with truth has made me very, very sensitive to all of the untruths being spilled around and on my life.  It hurts.  It sucks.  And I am done.

What a shitty thing to do.  Manipulate and lie to someone else so that you can continue on with your journey as uninterrupted as possible.  To change and alter another’s reality so that you can create your own narrative that supports you and only you. 

I wish I could say that I had not indulged in this shitty behavior but I have.  Tiny lies, huge big fat ones.  And it matters not at all what they were about now.  The fact that I lied, manipulated and deceived is totally on me.  And I feel shitty about it.  And while I can see the wreckage of my past clean up efforts, I can also see that I am going to have to get to a new level of honesty about me, my thoughts and feelings.  And I guess this blog is kind of a warning.  I am not going to pull punches anymore.  I am not going to shave off my true feelings for some more palatable truth for you.  I am not going to lie to save myself the trouble or the accountability.   I am going to just tell it like it is and allow your reaction to be your own.

I heard this guy say one time that sometimes his wife doesn’t look great - like her hair is weird, her butt doesn’t look good in those jeans or something like that and even though he could not say anything and move on with his evening or day, he tells her the truth no matter what.  Even though it will cause a fight in the moment, even though it will not bring peace or allow a pleasant event to continue.  He tells the truth about all the little things so as to pave the way for the truth to find its way into larger, more important, emotionally charged things that would be much more egregious if lied about.  Kind of following the logic of: if you lie now, you will lie later.  If you truth tell now, you are much more likely to truth tell later.

This is a hard reality for me because I often do not want you to know what I feel.  Hell, I am not sure I want to know what I feel on any given fucking day.  And then once I actually know, I kind of wish I didn’t.  I would like to believe the beautiful lie, over the hard and ugly truth.  And that is what I think has happened to the truth.  We just stopped wanting it.  And so became unwilling to do the things that allow for an honest engagement with life.

We are out there putting filters on our photos, pretending to be something we are not.  We are shaving off the truth from situations and relationships as if there is some sort of prize for maiming those we love.  Lies hurt...always, no exceptions.  Even when we tell ourselves that the lie is the better option in the moment.

I guess where I am with all of this is that I can see now that lying is like drinking for me.  The moment I engage it, that is exactly the moment that I no longer have access to the spiritual plane.  I have cut myself off from the source.  I cannot be spiritual and not fucked up.  And I can see now that I cannot lie and be connected either.  About anything at all.

Recently, there has been a rash of lying on me.  People I love dearly lying to me about their sobriety, their intentions, whether they were fucking other people, how much they loved me, where they were and what they were doing, how they were paying for things (with my money and credit card that is how) and all sorts of other lies that would take me an hour just to write it all down.  The kitten in the Amazon box?  Nope didn’t happen, all a ruse.  The kitten was procured for free from Craigslist - on purpose.  And I was lied to for over a week about that.

I have inventoried the fuck out of everyone else’s lies wondering what part I play in this whole ordeal.  And I have come to the conclusion - I allow people like this to stay in my life.  And I have also realized, I am fucking done.  I am tired of being lied to.  I am tired of all the lack of truth.  I am tired of it all and no matter how much I love the fucking liar, I am ready to cut them loose.  Even my children.  I just can’t do it anymore.  To stay and engage in relationships with people who will lie to you just as they look at you, feels so fucking sick and wrong and awful that I am willing to walk no matter who you are.

I guess there is always another bottom to hit.  I realized last night on my walk, not everyone wants to be well.  Some people actually want to be sick, to remain mired in the toxic dysfunction.  I am NOT one of those people.  I have worked fucking hard to pull myself from the depth of addiction and self abuse.  I have fucking worked very fucking hard.  And I can no longer afford to engage with those people who do not want to be well.  I would say I am not mad about it but I kind of am still.  That will pass.  I don’t think I have ever set a boundary that wasn’t fueled by a certain level of agitation and anger.  Those two fuckers have saved me more than once in my life.

But now I am just done, more than I am pissed.  I just don’t want you in my life anymore with all your bullshit.  And this would include my children.  I love them with a ferocity that rivals nothing else I know, but they too are going to have to step up their game or do with a much more truncated relationship with their mom.  I am not willing to live the lie for anyone anymore, not even them.

On the positive side, most of my friends are not liars.  That is an area I have cleaned up quite a bit.  Most of the people in my life who are close to me today are people who tell the truth even when they know it might hurt me, piss me off or even end the friendship.  They care about me so much that they are willing to end things if the truth cannot be the basis for our relating.  And I appreciate that so very much.

I am also resigning from helping people who do not want help.  As an attorney, a coach and a sober person, I come into contact with a lot of people who need to change, who want to change, who engage my services (paid and gratis) who desperately need and want to change.  But most of them want to not change more.  And so there is quite a bit of toxicity that goes with those relationships.  And I cannot afford to do that anymore either.  I may spend more time alone, less employed and more solitary but I prefer that over the engagement based on lies and delusion.

I guess I am choosing me at this point.  I would rather have a good opinion of myself, of how I show up and for whom than I would like to be popular or well liked.  It seems to me in the world today, those we like a lot are often the worst liars out there.  It is all a facade.  And I just can’t do it anymore.

So if you are in my life, consider this notice of the truth that will be told going forward.  You may not like what I have to say or even how I say it but you can bet that it will not be a lie.  It will be truthful and honest because I want to engage the Divinity and welcome that into every single one of my relationships, including the most important one, with myself and God.  So moving forward, I am going to call it like I see it.  I will tell you my truth so that you will feel safe telling me yours.  And if you aren’t interested in that, please, by all means, take your leave of my life right now.  I have no more time or room for liars, manipulators or deceitful people hell bent on just getting over on you.

I have had the opportunity to show up in the lives of others and tell the truth...the whole unadulterated truth.  And that is the cleanest living I have ever known. And for me, at least in this moment, I would rather stand in the hard and often excruciating light of truth than to walk in the dark deceitful comfort for even one more second.  Sure the truth hurts. But there is no way a truth can ever hurt more than a lie.  I know, I have been living in the deceit of others for far too long now.  Calling it truth when I knew all along it was just bullshit.

And to all the toxic people who pay lipservice to wanting to get well and wanting my love, support and assistance, I can’t do it with you anymore.  I cannot want you to not destroy yourself more than you want that for yourself.  If you are done and want help, I will show up and I will walk that path with you.  But if you are just fucking around, wasting yours and everyone else’s time, then I have to cut you loose.  The hands of time stop for no one and I want to spend whatever time I have left being happy, being joyous and being free.  And I can only do that by living in an ever evolving truth.  One that I must insist upon because I have recently learned that my life does in fact depend upon it.  It isn’t just that the truth shall set you free, it is that living with anything less isn’t really living.  It is existing.  And anyone who has every lived, even one moment of their life can tell you that there is no comparison between living and existing.

Life happens where truth is told.

Existence happens everywhere else.

Always.

And you can totally quote me on that.