Living my Truth

Sitting around the table with a bunch of improv colleagues the other night;  we were swapping stories about life and failed relationships and our 'worst dates ever'.

I knew exactly the story to tell. It starts with me arrogantly talking up all of my love of the outdoors (I don't) and ends up with me in the water under an upside down canoe, swimming to the point of exhaustion and at one point clinging to a tree in the middle of an (I wish I was kidding) alligator infested lake. All because I didn't have the guts to be honest with the guy I was with at the time and say that I'd never been canoeing and didn't really enjoy the thought of it. I wanted his approval even at the sake of my own safety, so I lied. After I 'fessed up' and said that it had been a turning point in my life and since then, I never lie about my personality and likes and dislikes, one of my colleagues overhearing, looked at me and said, "You gotta live your truth!"

I've thought about little else since he made that seemingly innocuous remark.

What is living your truth?  Do I 'live my truth'?  What is my truth?

These thoughts have chased themselves round and round my brain like some sort of demented carousel ride.

I'm rarely completely candid with people. I often utilize writer's privilege using it to embellish my own life to make it seem more exciting and hedonistic than it really was, rationalizing that I am hurting no one. Except, it seems...myself.

Why do I try so hard to conceal the person who is really inside?
I guess the answer is rooted somewhere in the truth. Which is that I've lived such a comparatively sheltered and quiet life. When my parents divorce was final some 30 years ago, I walled myself off like a sort of box turtle. I swore that if love and relationships made people this miserable, I wanted no part of it. I sought solace in books and work. I studied hard, I read everything I could get my hands onto. Reading became sort of an obsession with me, how many classics could I complete, how much knowledge could I cram in my brain?  I began competing with myself in class, on tests, how close could I get to a perfect score?

The other kids, just seemed like competition, a distraction, so I ignored them. The only relationships I experienced in those years lie mainly in the romance novels I read surreptitiously because I was ashamed of my craving for them. I thought myself above such 'baser' feelings. Gothic romances were especially favored because so many of the relationships in them started from a place of conflict. Conflict, that I understood, thanks to family dynamics.

So I entered my early adulthood with absolutely no social skills, no real dating life. I lived mostly inside myself. When I entered the world of work, I concentrated my efforts on learning administration, writing the best business letters, paying attention to computers, how they processed, how programs worked. Basically it boils down to the fact that I never gave much thought to relationships. My work colleagues never really knew me well and if they did ask me to join them for drinks, etc., my role usually was that of the designated driver. Living the life that I did, a latchkey kid, I grew up with hyper-responsibility. I slid into the role of the responsible co-worker/friend quite easily.

When I actually went into the dating world, I had no idea what to expect other than the fact that I wanted to experience the love and companionship that I had heretofore only experienced in novels. Men don't behave in real life the way the do in novels. I had no idea what they really wanted, so I became accommodating, needy. I just wanted to be loved and cared about, but I had no inkling how to articulate that.

All this is how I ended up under that canoe that September Sunday afternoon. I just wanted to feel connected to him, to somehow get him to love and appreciate me.

That's my real truth. I rarely did hedonistic things because I knew no one, I was always on my own,  I've always been somehow accountable only to myself or to God I imagine.

It makes you less welcome in crowds, etc. I don't have as many stories to share. People tend to think of you as sanctimonious, a prig, a goody-goody. Truly though, I had no thought other than self-preservation. I wasn't trying to live this life. This is the life that I ended up with.

That's my truth and I guess the only thing that remains now is to live it and with it.