It looks like the trend these days is an open, honest dialogue about one's shortcomings, the "truth" about one's life. My thoughts "Great! I can do that! I've got lots of shortcomings." Then I start thinking about how morose I can start to sound when I get down to listing my true thoughts and feelings.
There's a lot of truthful tidbits that I could go into; like how I examine every picture of myself closely to try and reconcile that printed picture with the image that I see staring out from the other side. I scrutinize my face, my expression, my body, my hair and most of the time I want to toss away the picture because it seems to so perfectly display all that I dislike about myself.
We are a species that edits the truth. We edit what we see in the mirror, our thoughts, emotions, the story that we tell ourselves and the story that we tell others.
I'm sorry but that is the truth. It is quite socially acceptable to do all of this editing, in fact we've been taught to do it. It's something like editing a paper for school to present a clear picture of what we want to say, but something happens to us somewhere in all of that editing.
The truth gets lost, it gets obscured, and it becomes difficult to say what is the truth and what is not.
So back to today's theme of truth telling. I've been going to therapy with my husband, this is supposed to be a good thing, I'm hoping it will be, but the past couple of Friday mornings (bright and early at 7:30 A.M.) my illusions about my relationship are being tested. First of all is the illusion that I'm not doing anything wrong. Apparently I am. I have an Ex-Husband, he was abusive in many ways one of the most destructive was the way he would interfere with my relationships with other men. He did this work in a very subtle way, you see I thought that my interactions with him were about our kids. But really what was happening was that he made other men feel less important to me. How? Well, I didn't want to hide anything from my sweetheart so when he called I would talk to him. I was cringing inside, trying to be civil and trying to get off of the phone as quickly as possible. Somehow though what was conveyed was that I wanted to talk to my Ex.
Well, I did and I didn't. I wanted to talk about our kids. It's hard to have a conversation with your new love about the children you had with your old love. They haven't had the same kind of experience with your kids and they know them differently than you do. So, I missed being able to laugh at my kids idiosyncrasies with my Ex. But that was about it, he drove me crazy (I say this in the past tense because he currently resides in jail). He was manipulative, made me think of myself as a bad mother, made me question my choices. He was always trying to get me to feel sorry for him (I have been more annoyed about this than anything for a long time). He threatened me and my new husband, indirectly he threatened to do things that would make the kids sad.
Yet from all of this I thought I was handling things pretty well, that is until my husband packed up and left me. How did things come to that? Poor communication I suppose, but also I think my husband was seeing a different version of the truth than I was.
Well, I'm out of time for now, I will write more on this later. For now, I just want to say that your truth is different from other peoples truths.
I don't believe in the truth. I believe in belief.
SG
