The Whole Truth

When I first learned how often I was lying to myself, I pushed back so hard that I truly believed my mentor must be crazy.

She had started asking me questions about things I had never been questioned about. Things I only held in private. Things I thought about behind the scenes but never shared with anyone.

The biggest lies I was telling her — and myself — was: That I was as confident as I appeared. That I was self-aware. That I had my life figured out and my inner world was as polished as my outer one.

The truth? My inner critics were raging at me constantly. I was self-sabotaging in ways I couldn't even see. And I was performing confidence so convincingly that even I believed it.

For a while, I thought she must be a mind reader. I thought there had to be a way she was watching me. It wasn't until years later that I fully understood the depths of how much she could see. She wasn't reading my mind. She was seeing the truth. And the truth wasn't the kind I was used to.

Her willingness to hold the mirror up — and my eventual willingness to look — is how I got to the bottom of my anxiety. It's how I started clearing out trauma and decades of terrible decisions built on top of lies I didn't know I was telling.

The Lies We Call Truth

Much of my life, I've been lied to. Told things that weren't fully true. And I knew they weren't — I just didn't know how I knew. I was confused about what was really going on much of the time.

Little lies, like where we were going and whether the tooth fairy was real. But bigger ones too — like how God was basically Santa, someone who would judge me and put me on a list. Like how if I went to college, I'd easily get a job. Like how I wasn't smart enough because I couldn't take tests. Like how I was too tall.

Do you see what I mean about lies? A lot of the time we call them truths. But in reality, they're all in the eye of the beholder — just like beauty is.

Many lies are told to keep us safe. Others are told to keep us in the dark. The ones I've found to be the most insidious are the ones covered in shame and guilt — the ones wrapped in the worry that someone will find out who you really are.

The biggest growth I've ever experienced came from allowing someone fully in. Someone who could see everything and tell me the truth. Someone further along on the path who I could trust to love me hard enough to not let me hide.

There are few people I've ever trusted to do that. Because most people tell the truth with lies attached. They're telling their truth through their own filters. Putting pieces together and reading between lines. Using only their own experience to decide what's true. And that's not truth — that's projection.

The WALL-E Inside Us

I was walking on the beach this morning before heading off on a deep retreat, and I was thinking about the Pixar movie WALL-E. How it shows humans as big blobs sitting on chairs, unable to move, sipping sugary drinks and watching screens. How when they finally began to look back through history, they realized they hadn't always been that way.

But I'm not talking about the physical version. I'm talking about the internal one.

I'm talking about all the little voices inside our heads that tell us their version of truth — and we just believe it. We believe we're too fat or too skinny. Too ugly or too silly. Too big or too small. Too much or not enough.

Those voices aren't ours. They're just voices. Many of them attached to other people who told us their truth — with their own lies attached — and we swallowed it whole. And over time, we became internal blobs. Sitting in the chair of our own minds, unable to move, consuming whatever narrative was fed to us about who we are.

What People Show Me

One of the things I've learned about myself over the last few years is that people show me the truth of who they are while telling everyone else the curated version. It's as if they know I can see through the performance. Or they see something in me that they either love or can't stand. But most people will show me a part of themselves that others will never see.

That's a gift. I know that now. And I'm learning to hold it without taking on their feelings as my own.

One of the biggest reconnections I've found during this Reconnection phase of The Reclamation is my own lack of lines to read between. I'm straightforward. I'm honest about who I am. I'm honest with other people. And that can land hard. I've learned over many years to soften myself so the truth doesn't hit someone between the eyes.

The only problem is I've also dimmed my light to the point of being blamed for things I have never done.