Here's the truth about living in your truth.
“All that you touch you Change. All that you Change changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.” ― Octavia E. Butler
This is an excerpt from The Healing Journal, where I share my most intimate pieces with our paid subscribers. I hope you like it.
I wish I could say that I intentionally decided to be honest with myself, but that never happened. No one would choose to give up the life that I had, even after coming to the realization that I wanted none of it. Life was so much easier back then when I clung to my ignorance, not because it was bliss but because there was no reason to believe I was made for more.
And If I’m honest, I sometimes long for that past life. It is easy to fall in love with the status quo because it is safe. Yes, we are slowly dying inside, but things are simple. We give all of ourselves to these cookie-cutter lives, and they give us nothing in return. Yet, it’s okay because we’ve been trained to define our emptiness as peace.
If we could see the future, we would fight like hell to not let our truth win because living in it hurts. You feel everything. You see everything. So you are forced to leave the places and people you knew because now you understand you were never comfortable; you were only numb.
Now, my days are heavy, and I am raw. I finally learned that it is not the devil that comes to steal, kill and destroy. It is our truth that does that.
And if we truly want peace, we must let our truth do its painful yet so necessary work.
I wonder what it must be like to be part of the small group of women who have always lived as themselves. They were the little girls who never were told they had to change or they were born not giving a damn what anyone thinks. They are rare.
Then there are the ones who fall into authenticity. We avoid it all of our lives and do so successfully until that thing happens. The thing that runs through your world, destroying everything you believed your life would be. The thing that enters your life and leaves you so stoic and cold, almost unfeeling. Or the thing that you’ve seen but never thought would happen to you, and then it did.
So we run. We start to see the cracks in the ground that invite us to share what we really believe and who we really are. But we easily jump over them—you know the saying, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” Or break her heart. We can’t be honest with ourselves; it would bring shame to all of the women in my lineage, who were able to live in the shadows and do what they were supposed to do.
Except what if they were forced to live that way? What if there was no decision? What if they did what they were told to do?
I’ll never know what they thought about marrying men out of tradition, not love. I’ll never know if they were excited about their pregnancies or filled with dread. I’ll never know how they felt when they learned of their husband’s new wife and other children. All I have is the history of grandmothers placed on pedestals because they displayed strength or silence, but no one looked at them because their eyes said too much.
When these women were alive, I was so young. Did they try to tell me? I never learned Yoruba, and it has always been hard to tell truths in the English language.
So, now, as I look at old photographs, I immediately look at their eyes, trying to search for their story. I was searching for some sign of whether they were able to live any of their lives on their terms. I was searching for their moments of resistance to help me understand mine.
I wish I had paid attention. Maybe I could hear the lessons they wanted me to learn if I had. Instead, my life was filled with reminders from an immigrant mother who came here and worked her way into a comfortable life. She stayed married, raised her children, and continued to work even in her 70s. She followed the rules and became the matriarch, even if it came at a cost to her health and her independence.
So, to avoid breaking my mom’s back, heart, spirit and dreams for me, I tried not to step on the cracks of brutal honesty- revealing that my life had been the one she pictured for me when she left her country but not the one I actually wanted.
So I lived that life, forgetting that unrepaired cracks widen and become deep chasms. With fissures this deep and wide, it is almost impossible to maintain the illusion of perfection in our lives.
So we continue in the lie, knowing the truth would break the lives of everyone in this story you built.
The man you aren’t sure you ever were in love with but liked a lot initially. The children you never saw in your future but now would never want a future without them. The women who helped you keep your vision going and in exchange, they trusted you would do the same.
We don’t want to hurt people, so we jump as long as possible. Unfortunately, the chasms become canyons over time. We look down and clearly see the jagged rocks and rubble.
Down there, it is neither pretty nor clean. It is filled with unstable terrain, mud and debris. It is not easy to traverse. It is dark and we can’t see the end.
How can that chaos be our truth? How can the version of the life that we dream of living be anything less than perfect?
So, we desperately try to figure out a way around having to traverse this gorge. Yet, it is inevitable; there is no escape.
And then we look again. We finally notice that it is peaceful- not down there- but within us. The inner monologues have quieted because we have now come face to face with our truth. It’s time to take it all in. We take a deep breath and realize the air is lighter.
It’s scary but damn, it’s beautiful to be here. And we realize, there is no way we can unsee it. We can never go back.
We eventually fall in, whether it be at 35, 40, 50, or 60 years old. And in doing so, we fall into our most honest life and our true self.
We were the ones who did not come into our authenticity on our own. We weren’t the brave ones. We tried to jump and sidestep and only out of exhaustion did we fall into this new phase of our lives.
Everything we have built—the homes, the careers, and especially the relationships—gets damaged in the fray. Everything broke open, including ourselves.
And to our surprise, we did not die.