You can’t escape the truth of you. You can shame it or bury it deep and deny it. You can attempt to reject it. You can smother it in white hot rage or try to stifle the breath from it but it will live on. Your truth lives on in all of its messy, beautiful glory because it is you and you live on. Such curious creatures we are really. Creatures who need so feverishly to offer up love and have it accepted and yet fight so hard to conceal the vulnerable, honest places where that love is needed most.
Truth and Vulnerability are a work in progress for me. I conceal and I hide. I use my decisions as a mother, a spouse, a lover, a child to build ever higher walls because I believe they offer up the safest compromise, that they offer the greatest benefit to my loved ones, because I believe that they are for the best. I craft an elaborate fortress of decisions. I make decisions because I want them all to be happy. I want them to be comforted. I want them to experience the beautiful without the brutal part. I build for them you see, and in doing so I lock me in.
And then the fury comes. The fury comes fast and white and hot because I know that I can’t give them the beautiful without the brutal no matter what the effort. And then the fear seeps in, the fear that I am as much capable of hurting them as I am capable of loving them. The fear that reminds me of all of my past mistakes and hints at all of the ones I have yet to make. The fear that knows all of my flaws. The fear that rises and crashes so violently that I lean in hard against it to be better, nicer, more giving, prettier, thinner, smarter, more, more. More. I fight against it until I am made still and exhausted because what other choice can I have? The fear knows enough to ask me what happens if they see past all of it and finally realize that it’s not enough? That it was never enough? That I am not enough. How could they still love me then?
I am not the fear.
The fear is not my truth.
The fear can’t take away my truth.
Because the thing about our messy beautiful truth is that it can’t be mitigated by our fear. Truth has such grace and it will rage and rage forth until it finds the fault lines in the protective walls built from judgment and humor and shame. Truth will rage and rage to the light that exists beyond the labels and identities we adapt to entomb it. Truth is fluid. It's beautiful rhythm can rush forth all at once like a breach in a levy or slip by quietly. It can find its way through the smallest of cracks in the granite, until it gathers enough force in its own time to break free from that quiet path towards the more vulnerable place in the light because it wants to be released. I want to be released. I want you to see me.
And that's where the messy, beautiful nature of it all makes us come alive, I think, because the journey back to our most authentic self is so raw and rich and honest. It is born from the messy, beautiful, glorious place of vulnerability. And love is the only authentic thing we have to offer up. Really, love is all we begin with and all that is left to us in the end. It can’t be managed or compromised or bargained away by fear. And it can’t be made safe. Messy. But my God, is it not so Beautiful?
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