An honest life

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Francie is growing up. She has always been a writer, but when she gets older her writing style changes. Her life is influenced by poverty and the realities of a loving, but drinking father who eventually dies. This is when she stops writing about pretty plants and wonderful skies she doesn´t even know about and starts writing about reality, the things she knows, the things that are true. Unfortunately, her English teacher doesn´t understand, calls her new writings ugly, and Francie suffers a blow to her soul.

But it inspires this reader. This reader that has always written and has always wanted to write.

A while back I wrote in my notes: ‘an honest life’. Aiming it to be a title, maybe of a poem, or maybe of something more. It expressed the desire in me to live that honest life, to strive for honesty and truth as my highest values.

This is more than the description of a life, because I feel my life lacks this value. If I would let some people of my past speak, I’m sure they would tell you I’m far from that honest person. And I happen to have a quality in me, a mystery surrounding me, that sometimes deceives outsiders. I’m aware of that quality, maybe too much, maybe I imagine it being bigger than it is, but I imagine myself being deceptive. I imagine I’m a person shaped by lies and almost as a walking, breathing, living lie myself.

This is quite heavy way to put it, but I feel that way sometimes. I’m not an active liar, but I’m also not the open book I wish I was. I’m a hesitant speaker. My first inner responses are often ugly and judgemental, thus I refrain from expressing them. And afterwards I find the perfect answer.

I’m sometimes nervous about telling the truth and then refrain from it. And I wish, I wish I wouldn’t be so afraid of people. I wish being truthful would give me peace. And I wish that peace would result in always being truthful.

Furthermore, I  know my mind in the past has in fact been shaped by lies. Which makes me sometimes hopelessly unable to discern truth from lies. I’m such a dreamer and such an empath, I can imagine anything as true. Someone only needs to suggest something to me and the mere imagining it could be true makes me guess if it is. This may be a quality, but it can also be a hopeless flaw. I might even be deceiving myself, making myself believe, wanting to believe a certain thing or worse, wanting so desperately for something to be untrue I imagine it is.

Then, you have the ingredients for a liar.

Lying is a sin. And I believe it’s one of the worst. The devil is a liar, among other things of course. But I’m sometimes so afraid to be honest.

Yet this is my resolution, to become that honest person, who lives that honest life. This is the start of my journey of my exploration of truth.

May it be so and may God bless this journey.