The heart of the matter

Are we honest with ourselves?  I mean, there are some little white lies we tell all the time, but are we honest with ourselves about the things that really matter?  It's hard to do, right?  It's kind of scary to face the big ugly truths. If we face it, then we might have to do something about it.  It's easier to ignore the harsher realities and honesties and live for the moment. 

Remember that scene in The Matrix when Morpheus tells Neo to choose between the pills?  One pill will lead him back to his quiet and boring programmer's life, ignorant of the larger truth, and another pill will deliver him into the cold reality outside of the matrix.  For a long time, I took the safe pill.  I liked my little safety bubble; I could sit and watch episodes of Mary Tyler Moore and eat peanut butter cups.  But earlier this year, when the proverbial fit hit the shan in my life, I had to reexamine how the practice of self-medication was serving me.  It is okay to self-soothe when hard things happen, and we need to figure out what we need when we need it, but beyond that, we need to not be afraid of the big awful truth.

For one thing, the big awful truth won't have any power over us once we confront it.  For another, we won't have to carry it around everywhere once we face it.  Growth and change comes from facing the big awful, and we are all strong enough to face it down.  I find myself waking up each morning and confronting my little lies.  I want to make sure I'm not carrying around some giant elephant on my back and putting on a facade of "I'm fine".  That stuff festers and smells and starts to become truth even though it is a fiction I totally created in my head.  So I have these mini-interventions with myself.  What is true, what is false?

I was an early cheerleader for truth... and Niwot, but also truth...

And the outcome is always good.  Freedom comes with honesty.  I've felt so alive this year and it is because I'm leaning into the hard and scary and demystifying it.  Does it suck, absofreakinglutely it does.  But it replenishes and fortifies in it's wake.  Peanut butter cups do not replenish and fortify, maybe in a perfect world.  But in the meantime, I'm trying to be real and truthful about who I am and what I want.