T is for Truth

One of the best ways that I have found to have a positive life is to always tell the truth!! This doesn’t just mean don’t lie, sometimes it means saying what is on your heart. Sometimes it means talking about the tough stuff, things that could hurt other people’s feelings and may not be easy to muster up!

I use this phrase about myself all the time “you may be able to call me a bitch, but you’ll never be able to call me a liar.”

Sometimes the things that I feel like I have to say can come out as harsh, rude and even mean. As I am getting older, I think about if they are really necessary to say and how I can best say them. We don’t need to be held down by all the things that we wish that we would have said.

It’s important to tell people about how we feel when they treat us a certain way or that we don’t like it when they do xyz. We have become so comfortable keeping our mouth shut so that we don’t upset someone else, but then we end up stewing on these terrible feelings ourselves.

Saturday morning my husband had to work for a few hours. While he was gone I could tell that I was starting to have a panic attack. I went upstairs to take a shower, so that my children wouldn’t see me break down. Then when I got out of the shower, my husband was home. He could tell something was wrong, but I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. So he sat on the bed while I got ready and I calmed myself down.

I sat down next to Paul and let all of my feelings spill out. Here is my truth, I worry about losing my husband to another woman nearly EVERY DAY. Nearly, every single day. It eats at me and it eats at me. I tell myself every day that it isn’t fair to think that, that there is no reason to think that, that infidelity is a part of your past, it was 9 years ago, a different marriage and a lifetime ago.

That doesn’t stop my mind from playing tricks on me. And typically, I can squash it. Typically, I can tell myself the TRUTH and I will hear it. Not Saturday though, I couldn’t shake it. So, I needed to tell Paul my truth. The truth about all that is happening inside my body sometimes. That even though I know that it is irrational, it isn’t Paul’s cross to bear, I needed to talk about it.

The thing is, that even though it was a really difficult conversation to have and to hear. My husband stood there watching me talk, not be able to breath well and backing up from him when he was trying to hold me. I needed to say all the words in my head, I needed to get them out or I would have had trouble breathing all day long. The truth is that even though Paul didn’t make the decisions to put me in a place to suffer from this stress, he did make the decision to be with me and knew what that entailed.

When we are honest with ourselves and with others our mental load can be lighter. We owe it to ourselves to lighten our mental load. When we tell the truth we don’t ever have to remember what we said to this person or to that person, because the story will always be the same. When the truth is spoken we don’t have to hold on to a weight or burden from “keeping our stories straight.” We owe the truth to those in our lives, but we really owe the truth to ourselves.