Even though the concept of “live your truth” makes me cringe and reminds me of Target t-shirts, pretty journals, and the disappointment of my immigrant parents, I’m here to share that I am finally trying it out and it feels really, really good.
I think I always will wrestle with my truth a little bit, but for once in my adult life, my experience hasn’t been resistance and struggle, but acceptance.
To get to this point, I put myself through the draining experience of fixating on a past event and constantly reliving the pain of it. I fixated on an event that had brought me face to face with my quiet struggle with my truth–almost every thought at the time was followed by a thought of what could have been, and pain. There have been plenty of times, since probably the sixth grade, when I struggled with my truth–but those always came and went. This one stayed and it was infinitely more painful. The kind that makes you rethink everything that could have possibly made you and your life what they are today. Thinking about it makes me want to cry a therapeutic cry for the grief I felt back then. It was so difficult and because it was an instance that demanded a life changing choice be made, I amplified my resistance to it.
I didn’t even know I was doing it. It felt like a choice had been made, when in reality I was at the peak of my resistance. Still struggling to choose. Even when my external environment began changing and it looked like my life had too, I still had not chosen. What “surviving” looked like had changed, but I still had not chosen my truth internally. Neither in my head nor in my heart.
It wasn’t until I recently started thinking about my future and the possibility of meeting someone–how a long-term relationship would mean my life crossing paths with someone else’s–that I finally noticed the internal ease I felt when I accepted my truth more than I resisted it. Thinking about merging my path with someone else’s was sobering, because it made me see more clearly the necessity of choosing one, of no longer holding off a life until I chose.
When I think about my life, I don’t see hard lines with spaces in between the chapters. No black dots marking beginnings and ends. I see soft lines, framing my life, like you could trace the outline with your fingertips and not feel any bumps–only a looping pattern at the points in my life where I struggled the most, before smoothing out again. I’d like to think all of the important decisions I made in my life are interconnected.*
I have always struggled with decision making and like public speaking, I put it off until I absolutely cannot put it off any longer. This usually works out fine, except I’m always second guessing the choice I made. The difference with this one–choosing to accept a truth and not neglect it–is that I’m being gracious with myself. I’m believing that there’s something telling about the comfort (and ease, and peace) you feel when you accept what you’ve been resisting. Whether this relief is from the specific choice I made or from having made a choice at all, I don’t really know. But I’m finally okay with finding out.
*Uhhh this could also be my subconscious trying to avoid the finality of decisions by imagining that the choices I made at all the difficult parts in my life aren’t set in stone, but somehow fluid.
The Ruminating Wanderer 