September 13, 2023
I Promise to Tell the
Truth
Dear Friend,
In one of the readings that we use for AA meetings, the word
“honest” is used three times. One of my biggest pet peeves, one of the things
that can permanently turn me away from a person, is someone who lies to me.
Even an omission or a failure to tell something can be considered an untruth,
can be a lie. If I am trying to cover something up, I am being dishonest.
My first husband was a compulsive liar. He lied about his entire history. He claimed that he grew up on a farm (a lie: the house his parents lived in at the time in the center of his small town in Iowa was the same house he grew up in); he claimed he lost a pregnant fiancée to a train wreck (a lie: there was no fiancée); he claimed he had hundreds of thousands of dollars in a European bank account from the life insurance of this dead fiancée (a lie: there was no money); he claimed he owned a house in a town close by (a lie: he stopped making house payments and the bank repossessed the house); he claimed he had a military background but was injured and couldn’t continue (a lie: he hadn’t even applied to the military, much less tried to complete boot camp); he claimed he had a near fatal motorcycle accident in California that caused the scar on his chest (a lie: it was from when he was born and they had to re-inflate one of his lungs). He lied about his drinking. He lied about when he got off work. He lied so much, I still don’t believe anything he says until it happens.
So I hate lies. I abhor lies.
But what is the truth? If there is more than one side to a
story (and if there is more than one person involved, there usually is), can
there be more than one truth?
I thought I knew myself by the time I was in my 20s. Then
Rita happened. I had to get used to being someone with manic depression….then
manic depression with psychosis. In my 30s, I added “alcoholic” to the list.
Another adjustment to who I was. Then in my forties, PTSD and “queer”.
How do you know when you truly know who you are? When you
are done with the big reveals, the big changes, the adjustments to the
adjectives in front of your name? How do you know when you are doing the right
thing?
I don’t know that anyone is ever done changing, done
discovering truths about themselves, or is perfect at knowing the proper thing
to do at the moment.
Perhaps that is why we change our minds. Perhaps that is why
the truth seems to waver, seems to change.
Some people define marriage as a promise to God. So divorce
is a broken promise to God. That seems scary: a broken promise to some huge guy
in the sky. You leave, you are accused of lying to a deity.
But you may have promised something that could not happen
with an antiquated system that doesn’t allow for change.
Look at my “truths”. Why would I want to stay with someone I
never knew in the first place? Why would I want to stay when both of us were
miserable? What did each of us gain? Looking back, hanging on so long seems
absurd. Even our children were being hurt by this. Or in my other marriage, why
would I want to stay with someone who didn’t see ME? Someone who used and
berated me? Someone who put me in danger?
When is breaking the promise okay? When do I refuse to let
an overbearing generation or an antique idea of God tell me what my own
contentment or future holds? When is my truth the right truth to tell? When do
I refuse to let the “promise” hold my contentment and safety hostage?
Sometimes truth is black and white. Either you grew up on a farm, or you didn’t
and you grew up in a house in the middle of a little bitty town in Iowa. (Or
you moved off the farm in fifth grade, and now your farm has been absorbed by
the city you moved into, like me). Some people only see the world in black and
white, all or nothing. Javert, in Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, thought
people could only be all evil or all good.
But much of the world is somewhere in between. Somewhere in
the gray area that didn’t fit into Javert’s life, where a convict can be kind,
or a man can break the law to feed his family. Just like most of us mean well
and struggle with the “right” thing to do, all divorce isn’t “evil” and we all
aren’t going to hell for breaking a promise to some big angry God in the sky.
The world is a confusing, swirly place out there, where your
truth as you stand can be a little different from my truth where I stand, where
we think we are doing the right thing in the beginning but someone changed so
our agreement or relationship has to change too and that’s okay, where most of
us just want to be content and are striving for that, even if we accidently
step on a few toes, and we’re sorry, but we will make amends.
If we’re sincere, and honest, we can get through it
together, one step at a time.
I mean this, honestly and sincerely, friend.
Thinking of you.
Love,
Julie
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