The Truth Will Set Us Free

I wish we told the truth to one another. The real truth. Not the who ate the last cookie from the cookie jar? kind of truth; the truth that breaks us open, the truth that reveals our most sincere, unfiltered humanness. The truth that perhaps we aren’t even ready to tell ourselves:

I’m not okay. I’m scared. I feel ashamed. I don’t know what I’m doing. I made a mistake. I just need you to be with me as I am, in all my messiness.

Or our even deeper, more complex truths:

Your existence is mirroring back to me the parts of myself I am not yet ready to see. My judging you is merely me judging myself. You are showing me something that makes me feel uncomfortable; can I take a moment to sit with that discomfort and offer it loving kindness?

Imagine if we could tell each other those truths?

I wonder sometimes how different our relationships would be. Our families. Our communities. Our wars…

I see the wars we wage out there; they are not so different from the ones we wage behind closed doors. The same need to defend, to be right, to make someone else wrong, to protect our tender hearts beneath it all.

I know what a ceasefire feels like. That moment when we become so exhausted from projecting, defending, attacking and trying to be right that all we can do is lay down our weapons (or words) and ask for respite. We tell ourselves we need time to regroup, but what are we regrouping for? Another battle? How many wars, between lovers, between families, between nations, continue because somebody has to win? Because pride will not let us soften. Because shame will not let us apologise. Because fear will not let us say the truth: you hurt me. I was scared. I didn’t know how to tell you. I want so deeply to let Love back in.

Truth is not simply telling someone what they did wrong. Sometimes the deepest truth is what lives underneath the accusation. You don't care about me might really mean I'm afraid I don't matter to you. I don't need you might mean I am terrified of needing you and discovering you won't be there. I'm angry with you might be covering I'm hurt, and I don't know how to let you see how much.

Truth invites us to keep going beneath the first story. Beneath the blame, beneath the defence, beneath the version of ourselves we have learned to present to the world, until eventually we reach the thing that is hardest to say: this is where I hurt. This is what I'm afraid of. This is what I wish you knew about me.

Have you ever asked someone, How are you? to which their response is usually fine. Have you stopped to ask again, How are you, really? And started to witness the mask come down? And then again, How are you, sincerely?

It is only here that you start to meet truth.

Oh, how the truth could set us free.

Because when we strip away the masks and the stories we tell ourselves, we begin to see what we are really longing for underneath them all is laced with Love.

How often do we spend our lives building walls to protect ourselves from the very thing we ache for? We long to be seen, and yet we hide. We long to be known, and yet we perform. We long for intimacy, and yet when somebody comes close enough to see behind the walls, every alarm inside us begins to sound. And then, when nobody can truly reach us, we say, see? I knew nobody would ever really see me. A self-fulfilling prophecy built from protection.

Sometimes I wonder whether underneath so much of our behaviour is one very simple longing: can you see me in my pain? Can I tell you about something that happened to me before I even had language for it? Can I show you the parts of myself I have spent a lifetime hiding? Can I tell you that underneath my anger is fear, that underneath my control is helplessness, that underneath my independence is sometimes a desperate longing to be held? Could you witness me there without trying to fix me, judge me or turn away? Could you tell me, you are safe here.

I wonder what would happen if we became safe enough to tell each other the real truth. Not the truth we think they want to hear. But the truth offered with trembling hands. Truth that requires us to look into the mirror and face whatever looks back with so much Love that flowers bloom from it.

Would some of our wars end? Would some relationships survive things we thought were unsurvivable? Would some children grow up carrying fewer wounds that were never theirs to carry?

Let us find the courage to share that kind of truth.

Because that is the place where freedom lives.

🤍