“What I know is this: The truth is ultimately life affirming. Even when it was ugly and inconvenient and has the potential to dismantle your life. It feels like relief even when it's painful...in a "this is real and therefore you can stand on it" way. The truth is uncomfortable but confining. You know the difference when you feel it. For most of my life I believed I had to lie to get what I needed. I'm guessing somewhere inside, you believe this, too...While lying almost works, just like drinking almost works, neither will ever take us all the way home. While the path may be longer and harder and a little lonelier at times, honesty will always move you closer to love, not further away. Today I don't walk around looking over my shoulder, afraid of being found out. I don't fear picking up my phone or looking at texts or opening my mail. I don't protect different versions of myself, and I don't have to keep track of my stories, because there aren't any - there's just the one life I'm living. I'll never forget the day it hit me that things were altogether different...My mind started to wander, searching for the familiar grooves of worry or scheming or protection to run down, but there wasn't anything there but smooth spaciousness. There was the warm sun making rainbows behind my eyelids and my bare feet hitting the baking asphalt and a bit of chewed-up carrot in my mouth. I had nothing left to hide.” TruthHonesty Book:We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life Source: We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life
“This is the 10 percent withholding. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but right then they agreed it was okay to lie to each other - even if only a little...But they were always operating just left of center, hovering around the truth of who they were, unwilling to life the film from their eyes. It was a lot safer this way, but it was also extraordinarily lonely... It would have been a risk to call him out on the little fudging of the truth...she would have had to withstand a moment of discomfort...it might have allowed then to actually fins an honest ground zero from which to build something.” TruthLonelinessHonesty Quotes Book:We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life Source: We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life