Capital T Truth
How to turn gray into color
Hi friends! Thank you for being here. Words are hard. Using language to bring words to felt sensation is hard.
This one is a bit of a weird ramble that might not land with everyone, but I trust it will speak to those who needed it.
Truth and the body
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about truth. If you’ve been here a while, you may have noticed. Truth is one of my highest values in life. Not just the obvious telling of truth, or truth defined simply by the absence of direct lying.
But truth in the sense that there is an innate wisdom that lives inside of all of us, that speaks to all of us.
Capital T Truth.
Truuuuuuuth. In your bones, soul screaming, truth that whispers,
“This way.”
Truth as that itchiness that says,
“This isn’t right.”
“I need more.”
“That’s not safe.”
There is a deep, ineffable, universal truth that tells us what we personally need, how we feel. It is always there, speaking to us, no matter how lost we feel, how buried it is. The question is whether we listen to it or not.
The truth always shows itself eventually. Even when we lie to ourselves, the truth always shows up in our bodies.
Because the soul cannot lie.
There has been nothing in my life that has been made worse by the truth. I’d. Always. Rather. Know. In intimate relationships (the people who deserve our Truth) I’d always rather say the thing, even if it causes tension for a moment. There has been nothing in my life that the withholding of truth has helped or saved. There has never been a choice I made that betrayed an instinctual truth I knew, that was the right one.
I tried to convince myself for years that I was safe in a relationship that kept showing me otherwise. Still, my body knew the truth, and she told me in many ways. I’ll never forget the panic in my body every time I had to go visit my family in the house my step father lived in. Every single time my body would protest. I’d feel nauseous, tight, anxious. I felt the pain of the Truth that working at a bank would kill me, and I followed it. I felt the tug of Truth that I should dedicate my studies and labor to serving the Earth and it led me to some of the most amazing moments of my life. My connection with that deeper, grounded part of me has kept me safe, and also led me towards deep joy. Truth has also broken my heart with her messages, but I’ve learned no matter how hard, I must follow her, or slowly rot.
…
But what happens when we aren’t really connected to the essence of truth, or lose our connection to it? What happens when it’s not truth speaking to us, but something else masking as it?
We see extreme examples of this every day in people that are screaming they know the way, they have the answers, but are also the most miserable, horrible, disconnected people on the planet. We see this in people who have known that they are in the wrong relationship, job, life path, but have ignored it. The power we have to lie to ourselves is truly terrifying.
But what about less extreme examples of misalignment?
What happens when you are a person who actually feels overall pretty connected to themselves? Who feels sensitive, empathic, connected to their desires?
Buttttt you’ve also experienced trauma. What happens to your relationship with truth if you deal with anxiety, or depression, or intrusive thoughts, or abandonment issues, or or or or
the list of possible disconnections from self,
(from truth)
go on.
How do you tell the difference between
anxiety or truth?
As the sun sets in the forest I live in, there’s this fifteen minute window where the tops of the longleaf pine glow orange and their long reaching trunks turn a grayish-purple color. I see the same tones in the tree’s bark that cover ripe plums in the summer, that dusty purple that rests on the skin until you dip the plum under the faucet.
Why are the most beautiful sights always impossible to photograph?
I’m often thankful for the years I spent as a teenager, painting. Before I was a biologist, I was an artist. When I was skipping school all the time, my art teacher was the only one who reached out and asked me what was going on. I remember not being able to find the words to tell him, but instead asking him if I could write a letter. I’ll never forget his face after he read it.
Art was always the class that felt the safest to me during my shitty high school days. Maybe I’d missed the math lessons of that week, so I’d struggle to complete the assignments when I did show up. Maybe I hadn’t even started the reading we’d been assigned, so I couldn’t participate in the class discussion in English class. Maybe I’d missed the lessons and worksheets in Biology, so I had no idea what was going on when I’d show up (the irony that I always felt so dumb in these classes, and I’m a literal biologist now). But in art class, it was different. It didn’t matter how many days I missed, how many lessons I missed. When I showed up my body knew how to do what was asked of me. There was no “wrong” in art class. There was no “you don’t understand.” Any art teacher worth trusting knows that everyone is an artist.
Those art classes and my time painting saved me in many ways. It made me remember that I mattered, that I could create things. It showed me that I could turn my pain into something beautiful, much like I try to do now with writing. During my senior year, when I was finishing my diploma at a completely new high school, a semester after all of my classmates had already graduated, art gave me some pride. There was a senior art show and I was part of it. My family all showed up to see it. Paintings of my baby brother lined the walls. People told me they were proud.
Though, I’m most grateful for the way art expanded the way I see the world. Art taught me presence. It taught me to look closely. It taught me about positive and negative space- how to see the whole picture, how we need both light and shadow to be whole. Art taught me nuance. Art taught me curiosity.
Art allows me to see the truth of colors in the world. To many people, the trunk of that longleaf pine at my house during sunset might just be gray, or brown. But the memory in my paint brush knows that I would need to pick up notes of purple, notes of lavender, notes of pink, in order to make the painting tell the truth.
Art says,
sometimes what first appears just gray and dull, actuallyyyyy has so much more warmth and depth to it if we are
curious.
I, like many of you reading here, have realized over the years I am a very very sensitive and empathetic person. I can feel shifts of energy in rooms, I can read the smallest changes in body language, in tone (don’t even get me started on how research is now suggesting this sensitivity can be a result of the trauma of growing up in tumultuous households where reading shifts in energy was adaptive).
My sensitivity and empathy have been super powers that have connected me to truth in many ways, but they like anything else, they can have a shadow side.
What happens when we decide that we know the Truth about someone, about what someone is feeling, about a situation, and we are just plain fucking wrong?
Stay with me here.
Dear “empath,”
What if sometimes you actually don’t know what is going on inside of others?
What if your analysis of their behavior is colored by your own insecurities, issues, perceptions?
How do you separate projection from reality?
How do you separate a momentary bad feeling from a deep knowing that something is wrong?
Where is this coming up in my own life? Many many places, but here is a simple example.
Well,
I am dating a beautiful person who absolutely adores me. He makes that no secret, and I never, ever have to wonder how he feels about who I am as a person, how he feels about the chance to be with me, how he feels about our future together, how much he desires to be a team, how much he desires to grow with me. There are no games, there is ghost of a woman in the background to make me jealous, no matter who else is in the room or how far away I am. His essence is deeply kind.
Yet I find myself, in the midst of normal day to day life frustrations, creating a narrative about how his actions translate into his feelings about me. The smallest shift in tone is read as negativity. Anything neutral is perceived as rejection. The smallest frustrations with life in general are read as something being personally wrong with me.
I create an illusion of truth, that is really just a mess of projections-
(and is often just caused by not asking myself what it is I actually need to feel safe, and then asking for it- but that’s for another day).
Because how fucking confronting is that? Having to say what you need?
Where the magic and healing have been found in this is, instead of deciding that my perception is right, that I can feel what my partner is thinking and feeling- I’ve been trying to pause, and then lead with curiosity.
Judgement, anxiety, projection, says:
“He did that because he doesn’t care.”
“He did that because he isn’t considering me.”
“I am not safe here unless I have control.”
Those thoughts can feel like Truth in the moment. But when I really feel into them, none of them are even close to truth.
Truth is a deep hum. It is constant, unwavering, grounded. Anxiety is a buzz. It is scratchy, impatient, childlike.
Curiosity can discern between the two.
Curiosity waits. Curiosity breathes. Curiosity is patient.
Curiosity asks sweetly,
“Can you help me understand you better?”
“What was going on inside of you when you were doing XYZ?”
“What were you feeling when you said XYZ?”
And you know what?
Every. Single. Time. The answers I receive from him have amazed me. Curiosity has been the key to learning how to love my partner better, how to understand him better. How to retrain my brain that I am safe, and I do not need to control the behavior of everyone around me to maintain that safety.
While I use a relational example here, applying the medicine of curiosity to almost any moment where I’m unsure if it’s my trauma talking or Truth leading me, has been so healing.
This was so what I needed to read today. Thank you <3