It is so important to learn to speak your truth in life
Last month I came across this LinkedIn post on World Mental Health Day, written by someone who had recently lost a friend to suicide.
Of their friend this person wrote, “The harsh reality is that sometimes we just can’t know what someone is dealing with inside. This was an individual who was full of energy and positivity, someone successful in his personal and professional life who people looked up to.”
Positivity. There’s that word again. This person was so “positive”…that they ultimately took their own life.
What must they have been carrying that no one else ever saw? And why did they feel they had to hide it?
In my last post I talked about toxic positivity and how it can lead to an often unspoken yet no less cruel insistence that people “be” a certain way that is acceptable to others because it avoids acknowledgement or exploration of uncomfortable and unpleasant truths. This can be extraordinarily damaging or even destructive, as the aforementioned example illustrates.
Interestingly, I’ve managed to thoroughly prove my own point in the weeks since penning those words.
“You were so negative in that post,” I’ve been chiding myself. “No one wants to interact with it because it was so dark and off-putting.”
I mean, maybe it was…if you didn’t read the whole post. And yet here I am, pontificating about it nearly two months after the fact.
To be clear, it is not at all unusual for me to subject myself to this kind of rumination immediately after writing about, well, literally anything on this blog. Rereading what I’ve written is very often akin to listening to a recording of my own voice—or maybe nails on a chalkboard. I can’t stand it, and so I’ll go weeks, months, or years before returning to this space, much less writing anything more here.
Why? Well, there are the usual culprits of shame, self-loathing, imposter syndrome, and the general sense that whatever I have to say is ridiculous and not worth reading. You know—all the things that would make for many hours’ worth of compelling topics of discussion in therapy.
This is why I keep a blog solely for purposes of catharsis, not because I expect anyone will read or care about it.
But more to the point—recently I’ve been coming to terms with the notion of just how brutally difficult it has always been for me to simply speak my truth.
To be more specific: I’m routinely afflicted by a primitive fear that merely being myself in certain contexts—my sarcastic, cynical self, who deep down has a mostly unfulfilled longing to simply call things as I see them—will lead to judgment or rejection from others.
At work right now, we’re implementing a new process for doing certain things that, to put it mildly, I have thoughts about. And despite the fact that I have never once gotten the sense at my workplace that anyone should be reluctant to speak their mind, I’ve still been struggling mightily with it.
What if you burn bridges, or come across as not being a team player? What if you’re speaking out of turn? What if you appear to be stubbornly resistant to change, or not sufficiently adaptable?
What if, what if, what if. I’ve not made any secret of my feelings on this particular matter, but there’s still a voice in my head that says maybe I need to apologize for them, or place some sort of asterisk on them to lessen their impact (“this is just my opinion and of course I defer to the team…”)
This is generally how I operate in my personal life, too. As it turns out, for the most part I’ve ended up not “doing” life the way popular culture says you should, and admittedly, I have no regrets about that.
Moreover, so many of life’s so-called milestones (getting married, making babies, buying a house, climbing the corporate ladder, etc.) seem to me to be inherently rife with absurdities, and I wish I could just be honest about that all the time. But then I worry about everyone I might offend.
Which begs a really important question: Why does it matter? If someone is offended, does that not say as much about them as it does about me?
And in fact, who am I benefiting with my reticence? Myself?
Not likely. Recently CNBC featured a clickbait headline teasing “the number one regret of the dying.” Want to know what it is? You’ll have to click so that they get their precious ad revenue.
Just kidding. I did it for you. The number one regret, according to the author interviewed in this article: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
Clickbait or not, it’s a salient point. This recent New York Times editorial, contributed by a professor of psychology at Cornell University, highlights the importance of speaking up as a matter of emotional and even physical well-being. And yet, as the article points out, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of biting one’s tongue over anxieties about how one’s viewpoint might be perceived or received by others.
But if we spend our lives constantly conforming ourselves to what we think others want to hear or see, what gets lost? What opportunities for expanded perspective and understanding are forfeited? What hindrances are thus inflicted on our relationships? What do we miss out on teaching others—or learning from them? And what regrets will we have when we look back on it all?
To the extent that this fleeting, mortal life has any purpose, I believe it ultimately has very little to do with what we accomplish, what empires we build, or what superficial identities we craft for ourselves. Instead, it’s a journey of developing wisdom and coming home to who we are—who we always have been—in a world that constantly tries to convince us that we’re never good enough, or that there’s something innately objectionable, defective, or shameful about our way of thinking or being that requires concealment or censorship in order to avoid condemnation.
The older I get, I more I realize that there’s really not much to be gained by people-pleasing or limiting myself to what I perceive the outside world will accept. But there’s plenty to be lost from it.
Thinking again about the outwardly “positive” person who carried profound inner pain that they never let on to others, I have to wonder how things might have turned out differently if they had. It’s purely a hypothetical, of course, but it speaks to a larger theme: Every life is a story desperately longing to be told—one that intersects with and has immeasurable potential to enrich and bless others, if we let it. The task we all face as human beings is leaning in to our respective stories with honesty, transparency, and bravery—even when those stories are messy and traumatic, even when they’re filled with truths or perspectives that others might not always want to hear, and even when the world tells us we should just stay quiet.
It’s a lifelong journey. And I, for one, still have a very long way to go.
