Let people in and tell them the Truth

“...I finally stopped pretending that I felt differently than I did. I'd spent my whole life trying to bypass anger, rejection, and weakness. I'd created an entire persona in order to avoid feeling those things...

I started to do the thing I had been doing, which was to bypass my actual feelings and say the thing I knew I was supposed to say: the more spiritual thing, the thing I thought she wanted to hear...But I stopped myself. I breathed.

Finally, I said, "Yes, I fucking miss it. I miss it every day. All the time."

There it was.

Everything in me wanted to take it back, or to explain more, or to qualify it with some kind of higher wisdom.

But another thing happened inside me then, too.

I felt a burst of expansion, like a pressure valve had been released.

Most of my life up to that point had been a series of small or large acts of pretending, which made the ground I was standing on shaky and unstable. I was never going to feel whole standing on that ground, even when it appeared to be attractive, solid, and right, because it was built on falsities and my soul knew it.”
― Laura McKowen

“Loneliness started to abate only when I began to really let people in and tell them the truth, and that took a long, long time. The antidote to loneliness wasn’t just being around others or sharing common ground. It was intimacy.”
― Laura McKowen