The secret life of me

Actually, I make an effort not to have secrets in my life. There are certainly things I am not fond of recounting and there are more than a few people I wish knew nothing at all of my life now, but I abhor secrets.

I felt surrounded and consumed by them as a child and in my early 20s I made every effort to rid my life of them. I didn't feel like I was being given the truth by those around me, I was being conditioned to be a liar. Lying was easy for me and seemed even to be preferable to the truth. You give people the answers they want to hear and it makes them happy, they feel at ease. I am a top notch people pleaser (Gemini) with decades of experience and have always put more import on making other people happy. But the weight of knowing things and having no one to talk to about them, no one to share them with was killing me. I was miserable. I didn't realize at the time that it was also killing Truth. Neither of us could breath under all the mis-tolds and un-tolds.

The biggest and most complex secret in my life I carried from the age of 13 until 18 or so. It was the one that, when it came out, was treated like 'no big deal.' Everyone suddenly acted as if they had all known the whole time and I'm sure many of them did and had been sitting on it themselves...that is the WASP way after all. But it was a big deal for me and it broke my back. Like the proverbial camel, it was the straw that did me in. I just couldn't do it anymore. I started to become a truer person. I realized that almost no one actually knew me because, in my efforts to appease them, I hadn't been honest about who I was and what I felt. I began learning how to live inside my own Truth.

I chose philosophy as my major and found that I was equally drawn to and frightened by the idea of Truth. I felt like we (Truth and I) had been estranged for so long that our relationship would always be tattered. But it wasn't that way at all. We were out of step, that was for sure, but nothing had been torn asunder. It was hard to get things going (old habits and all) and I hurt some people (one person mostly) but I stuck with Truth and that person stuck with me.

I have come to believe that Truth is an expression of Love. If you want to love someone you have to be honest with them about who you are so they can make a completely informed decision about the kind of person you are. When you keep things hidden or outright lie, you are not allowing them all the information they need, you are holding them back and that is not what Love is about.

This is not to say that there are no blemishes on my relationship with Truth today. I still question and sometimes struggle and occasionally I stumble. But Truth remains important enough to me that I make every effort to fix the things I might break along the way.