The Untrue Truths We Tell…

What am I even talking about? Hang with me a minute…

I am not sure how your mind and psyche work, but mine, mine tells me things all day long, sometimes even while I sleep and sometimes even wakes me up from sleep to tell me things. Now these things, these stories, appear, feel and are true for me at the time. They are absolute, reliable and true. Except they aren’t. But I don’t know that at the time…in fact, I am kind of the last one to know, almost always.

I so believe what my head tells me. Even though it is wrong so often. It is like my mind totally erases all the times when it was dead wrong…and only remembers, only cares about believing these untrue truths that I tell myself.

I find my relationship with my mind, that much like one you might have with an itinerant lover. You want the time, the sex, the payoff so you are willing to believe all the stories of busyness, reasons why he is unavailable, not showing up for you or the relationship. The sex is so good and the connection so strong that you just whitewash all the bullshit because it just doesn’t fit the story you need to believe to keep going with him. The truth, the very inconvenient truth, is that he is lying, always lying but you like the lies so you just go along with them, maybe not believing them at all, maybe believing them a little bit. Either way, it is the same, you stay, endure the lies and their consequences because facing the reality is just too painful, harsh and well, ending.

But I have found that in all this messy lying, there are some seeds of truth that live on anyway, well fertilized with all the bullshit being spread around, soaked in the tears of your breaking heart and grown into some whopper untrue truths.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that I want truth to be absolute — innocent or guilty. And life just isn’t that clear. I can be falling in love with someone who is all wrong for me, but the reason I am falling in love with them are real, at least in that moment. I won’t know or be able to see really the error in my thinking or feeling or actions until way later. And this is just the way life works. Always. For all of us.

Perhaps some of us are better at hanging back and waiting. Some of us just can’t hold back, we wish we could but whatever appears true for us, is just true…until it isn’t. And I have stopped fighting this anymore. Truth is relative, at least where it comes to feelings and thoughts. Some things are black and white but most things in life are not, they are mired in a sea of grey, cloudiness that will not become crystalline until much, much later. More information, more life is required for you to see the fallacy of your own thinking.

And that is just the way it is. At least for me. I know that right now there are like probably at least five things that I am lying to myself about, and the truth is present, I just can’t access it, I can’t see it right now. I am blinded by fear, delusion, self interest, selfishness…whatever else comes to prevent me from seeing reality. And that is ok. Sometimes, and I guess for me maybe all the time, it just has to be ok, because life is full of untrue truths and I can’t see them until way later.

And other people may be able to see them and be so bold as to tell me about them, but often I am deaf to their perspective, not capable of owning a reality that is not my own. So needing in the moment to believe in the untruth that feels real to me in the moment.

And I believe, I have arrived at a place where I am ok with this. I mean I can’t fight it. I have tried and failed so many fucking times. And regardless, emotionally there is no untruth of mine that can survive the icy reality of future experience. What is true for me now, will not be true for me always. And while I love to live in absolutes, there just aren’t any…except that I will grow old, I will get sick and I will eventually one day die. Those are the only absolutes for any of us. Pretty cheery, right?

But within that I realize and find comfort that there is always some truth in every lie I tell. And there is always some untruth in every truth. I want it to be easy to identify but I am always growing and changing, so so is my truth, or lack thereof.

What brings me an abiding peace in this vast sea of uncertainty is that I know there is truth in every lie I tell, and I know that there is also an untruth in every truth I tell. The most important thing in all this living, and lying and truth telling is that I remain aware of all the machinations that march on under the surface of myself, the motives, the strategies, the opportunistic wanderings into the shady and often dark areas of the fictions of my mind.

My life line is to know that while always endeavoring to tell the truth, I am always, always lying too. Mostly to myself, but also all of you, which is an inconvenient but honest truth about living. More is always being revealed to us. One moment at a time and the truth, at least for me, is only absolute in the moment. The only place in my life where I can be certain, absolutely certain that I am telling gospel, is right here, right now. And then, in that moment, to realize that gospel changes with the passage of time. And it really can’t be any other way…the truth lives on in every lie I tell. And the lie lives on in every truth. And somehow, that brings me comfort. Perhaps an ultimate truth, for me, is that life, is ever changing, always, and if I am living it, so am I.