Honesty

Addiction breeds dysfunction breeds dishonesty breeds unhealthy relationships. It goes on and on. The question of the year for me is "where will it end?" I have spent most of my life living in dishonesty, mostly about my motives and about who I really am. This is not usually intentional dishonesty, mind you. My inability to recognize the truth goes so deep that I am very easily able to believe that I am living a forthright life when in fact I am full of shit.
True honesty requires more of us than merely telling the truth. If we are to live an honest life, we must continually look for the motives that drive us to behave in ways that do not express our true selves. This is not an easy task. The pressures of our families and our culture can lead us to think and act in ways that express the expectations placed upon us, rather than letting our true selves shine through. I am striving to live an authentic life, one which feels right to me on a cellular and spiritual level. The quality of my relationships is directly affected by my ability to interact honestly with others. I do not mean the kind of brutal honesty that can be hurtful, but a frank expression of myself. If I am to reach the end of my life and feel that I had an existence that was meaningful, it is imperative that I continue to search for the truth, my truth. Not your truth or their truth, but my truth. But will I know if it is the truth, or more bullshit?

Grief

Grieving is a long process. In our culture, where you get three days off work if your Grandmother dies, we seem to think that you can make a tidy package of grief and be done with it in a few weeks or months. The reality is that grieving can go on for a lifetime. My brother died thirty two years ago, and last year on his birthday I cried all day. When I see other people with their siblings, I feel the loss all over, in deeper ways than I did in the beginning. Grieving my childhood has been a process filled with potholes and dark hallways. I want to take the little girl who was left to fend for herself all morning in her highchair and hold her in my arms until she feels safe. Most of the time I do not dwell on the realities of my childhood, but once in a while something happens to cause those feelings of fear, loneliness, and unworthiness to rise to the surface. Then I find myself drowning in grief. Recent events have weakened my normal resilience and left me vulnerable to these issues. I am looking at this as a gift. I do not learn anything when things are good. I am normally strong and positive. I need to be knocked down hard before I become open to the lessons I need to continue to grow. When I am hurting, I am learning. We are three people: the person we think we are, the person other people think we are, and the person we really are. My goal in recovery is to find the person I really am. In the process of learning who I am, I have to grieve the losses that have helped to shape me. I don't like it, but as my friend Eva used to say, "Nobody said you had to like it".