“All you have to do is write one true sentence.
We all tell little white lies, every single day. I’m fine, nothing’s wrong, I’d love to, No I don’t mind, Sure it’s okay…I imagine most of us do this without thinking that we are “lying,” rather we are thinking of the feelings of another person and deliberately making an effort to be kind.
For more than seven months now I have been living the most truthful, most authentic life, I have ever lived. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. I feel what I feel and make no apologies. There are no hidden contexts in what I say and I do not hear any un-truths from the mouth of the man I share my space with. When I’ve got something on my mind, I get it out in the open and express myself and move on. I started publishing my first blog years ago, not so much because of a desire to share my innermost thoughts and fears but rather because I had been journaling since I was 13 and found that I typed much faster than I could write, and the tote under my bed, overflowing with 30 years of filled blank books, was now too heavy to move. Blogging takes up no space and does not require good penmanship. It is part of my life now, like cleaning and laundry, my job and yard work. It has become part of who I am, my identity; a single working girl with a blog.
Last summer I had an unexpected, ‘falling out’ I guess you could call it, with a friend that left me confused and a bit sad. I reached out the proverbial olive branch, and made an apology for whatever I had done that made her choose to no longer share a friendship with me. She never wrote back to tell me what I had done, or neglected to do, and I accepted that she was simply done with our almost daily interaction. One of the things that I know bothered her about me was that she believed I had a public personality and a private one; that I expressed cheerfulness and contentment on my cyber pages but was deeply flawed and hurting and totally unfulfilled in my “real” life. She was, upon reflection over these many months, mostly right. This woman is a voracious reader and she read me like a book. She could often pinpoint the exact thing I was feeling or thinking even when I could not properly identify it myself. She had great words of wisdom for me in my times of crisis, and truth be told, there were many over our years of friendship. She had an expression that I loved, that it’s her one ride on this big blue ball and she was going to live the life she wanted on her terms. I loved that about her; she was brave in many ways that I was not.
I don’t know if she ever reads my blog anymore but I want her to know that the bravery I admired in her has slowly seeped into me and grown into who I think I now am…I shared with her some of my darkest secrets over our nearly 20 years of friendship and she never judged, she always just gave me her take on it, whatever the situation was, and through her support and friendship I got rid of my last “secret” almost two years ago. It was liberating to be out from under a cloud, and while my truth caused two people some pain, I was free of it, and relieved. Last January when I began to see a therapist to try to sort out some of my problems and issues I was dealing with, many of the things this professional told me, and many of the tools she provided to me, were the exact same things my friend had said and suggested over the years and didn’t cost me $75 for the hour.
If all I have to do is write the truest sentence I know, I will write this: I miss her friendship. She was a good friend to me and I had some of the most fun times of my life with her. I am, and continue to be a ‘work in progress,’ but I continue to close the void between my true self and my public self, a little bit more every day. She helped me to get here, even in her absence, and I am grateful.
RStar's Common Grounds 