Tell Your Truth
I’ve been on a journey of learning to tell the truth. Specifically my truth. But telling the truth is hard when it’s not obvious, nor when we have not necessarily been taught how to tell the truth.
Advice from an unlikely location sparked my own now long evolving pursuit of finding out my truth.
It was the fall of 2019, a mere few months before the world would flip upside down. I was at a conference with a live talk from filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. I didn’t know very much about M. Night except for having seen and liked a few of his films. He was relatively young, and enormously successful as a creative. Things I try to emulate – being young, creative and successful… attributes that seem to evade me personally with each passing year LOL. Naturally I was open to listening to the journey of someone who had achieved my definition of a successful career.
Sometime during the conversation, the moderator pointed out a little known fact about Shyamalan before asking a related question that had the crowd, including me, leaning forward in our chairs to await his response.
Shyamalan movies are famous for not having much dialogue, and after pointing this out the moderator promptly asked: Box office revenue, divided by words you have written, makes you the highest-paid per-word published writer in the history of the world. What is your secret to success?
Shyamalan starts on a tangent that I am sure I will somewhat butcher all these years later – but I will try my best to capture. He dives into talking hypothetically about a 4th-grade girl in primary school. She is overweight, friendless, and sits in the back of the classroom ashamed, bullied, and humiliated of her situation. For a moment it feels a bit derogatory, but I then see he is speaking as best he can through her experience and to get to her point across to the audience.
After painting the scene, he asks what is it like to feel the brunt of disdain at such a young and vulnerable age? To be on the receiving end of a misogynistic culture that spews its hatred through endless mediums, but through no autonomy or consideration of this young victim? To be cast as a persona non grata in a world where everyone is handed and decided their value? Was she not capable of deserving love, grace, and understanding? And did she not feel pain, fear, and heartache as a child so vulnerable to a status and a system she had no part in creating? And what was that like – to be you but as her?
He goes on to link her condition to both unique experiences of similar young girls in her shoes and universal human truths, weaving together empathy and identification of not just others like her but in the larger context of anyone that could empathize and associate through this particular human experience. And how through that connection and awareness of association, there was incredible power in the potential of this young voiceless girl if she could accurately express her condition.
He then made an audacious claim – that if this voiceless cast away through many lenses of a harsh society could speak and share the real truth of her experience, that she would unequivocally become the world’s most successful and highest paid communicator and writer.
It was so well said in the moment, and such an eye opening discovery. One that I have been pondering and reflecting on for so many years now.
But how does one tell the truth, especially when one doesn’t even know the foundation of where the truth begins? Or the baggage we all carry that unknowingly (and to our detriment) misguides our capacity to tell our unique truths?
In my own experience, the problem with most truths I expressed for far longer than I care to admit is I simply thought my expressions were what others wanted to hear was my truth (this is literally the most ineffective tactic on the planet for becoming your meaning in this life. I am guilty of spending years doing this, and still catch myself doing this at times). So don’t be like me.
But also, I didn’t see that many unexamined truths I’d spout along the way stem from ideologies that were merely handed to me throughout life. Often through family ancestry, culture, political affiliation, religion, race, nationalism, consumerism, and all the other -isms that when examined, we realize contain truths we thought were fundamentally ours but may not be personal truths at all.
And this conditioning goes so deep. How deep can it go? For me (at 38.5 years young) it has taken years of work to peel back these layers, to meticulously scrutinize and rigorously examine the many ideas about who or what I thought I was. Assessing if it is really me or just something I was told was me, that I blindly accepted and syndicated to the world as being me. This is not to judge what truths were good or bad, but for me to discern for myself who I actually am. That I could be confident that what I expressed into the world was truly me, and not just the me I was conditioned to express, or the me I thought you wanted me to be.
Mark Twain says “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
This is a gentle reminder in my own personal truth seeking. All too often the closer I get to telling my truth, the more pressure and pain it causes in often uncomfortable ways. A silent guide in confirming and discovering the growth of a real truth over a handed to me truth.
The truth is vulnerable, the truth often hurts, the truth can be uncomfortable. It takes courage to say a truth and maybe even hurts the first time it’s said. A friend once called me a flake, it was akin to being stabbed in the gut because I knew it was true. But once out in the open, it allowed me to grapple and change this truth. Other times, I’ve expressed the wrong truths because I was convinced I was telling the truth as the “man who has it all figured out”. Another -ism (egotism) of what I thought was what the world wanted to somehow hear from me.
But the real truth, most importantly, helps people by empowering them. Even the most painful truth that is able to express itself, becomes a catalyst for strength and understanding. And an inspiration for others to step into their own power and tell their truth.
In my own search for truth I have to practice constant examination of my behavior and thoughts. I learn to seek out and try to listen to the real truths being express by others around me. And even better, if I can help others express their truths, by understanding and being without judgment. To see those around me make progress in navigating the truths they are working to express into the world, for the betterment of their world. And the entire world. It’s definitely a humbling and slow process I’ve had to also learn to be patient with.
The older I get, the more I see something I never saw. We all feel uniquely broken in to trying to express our true nature, but at the deepest level maybe we are all the same being having 8 billion different experiences based on external environmental factors that forced those differences (that created our genes, behaviors, cultures, perspectives, etc). Maybe this even extends beyond humans to all sentient beings.
The more personal truths we all are able to express, the sooner we could maybe feel the oneness and awaken to solving our collective suffering. Maybe we aren’t broken, but just pieces of the same brilliant ocean of ephemeral existence.
I’ve never met Mr. M. Night, but I appreciate the bit of advice he shared that day for my own journey of understanding and expressing my truth. And even though that young girl was hypothetical in his story, she is real in many ways all over the world. And with a daughter of my own now, seeing that truth being expressed is equally important for me to acknowledge and contribute in trying to better understand her world.
I look forward to the journey and chance to hopefully continue to gain a larger capacity for telling my truth and in seeing the truth cultivate and grow in those around me.