Truth: It Can Be Devastating; It Can Also Go A Long Way For All of Us as A Community
Are You Ready For This? To Tell the Truth That Is?
Have you considered truth? What do you think? You’ve heard many of my stories. You probably think you know me in and out by now. You don’t. Not even close. I have spared you so many parts. The difficult ones. The harsh ones. I have given you a glance, a mere peek into the intricacies of my life.
Truth! It can be devastating. Can you handle it? How much? How much truth can you handle without closing your ears? How much truth can you swallow? All of it? Nay! I doubt it.
Maybe if you were in your twenties, thirties or even early forties you can. Maybe if you are inside of a good marriage, you can. I used to be like that once. Or at least I thought so. Shunning all evil from my thoughts. Protecting my mind, so to speak. But did it help me? I would have to think.
It felt like I was masked with masking tape all around me. I was gagging all the time. It felt like I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe easily. This big python was closing in on me ready to crush me and splatter all of the living blood out of me.
But today? Today I’m free. But in order to be free, I had to listen to me. To my body. To my soul. I had to allow my spirit to rise like a phoenix. I had to stop living for others, especially those who controlled me.
It brought me freedom. But freedom comes at a cost. A dear cost. One that, if you are not ready for it, can topple down and engulf you like a building on fire. Or a collapsing roof. Over your head!
You will lose all the little bits of privileges you enjoyed. The crumbs that you were offered for your loyalty. For your lifelong service. For your unflinching devotion that got destroyed in the process.
Are you strong enough to weather it? The truth of your life? Truth is like the sharpest diamond you will ever encounter in your life. Only this diamond is multifaceted, has many sides, a million sharp points. One touch and it will make you bleed. Bleed hard. Bleed dry. No question about that.
Can you handle it? Can you handle listening to the truth of another person’s life? Perhaps you think you can. Have we not heard of a million infamous people in the news? But it comes at a cost, doesn’t it? It comes with judging.
Can you empathize with somebody like Pete Hegseth or Donald Trump without batting an eyelid? You can? Do you feel sorry for them then? Do you not feel angry with them for how they have been hurting people mercilessly? Stupidly?
Honestly? You can? Then you are one in a million! Really! No I am not talking about the MAGA racists. No I am not one of them. Sorry. That’s not where this is leading. Let’s not go there!
What about your own? Have you considered it? Your own truth. What do you know about yourself? Try writing it down for a month. All the thoughts that come to you. All the thoughts you allow to indulge yourself in. Consider writing them down somewhere safe and after a month, read it.
Would you recognize the person staring back at you? Is that whom you believed yourself to be? Consider doing this. That would show you who you truly are. Would you then be able to show this person to the world nonchalantly?
I’ve been writing, haven’t I? It’s easy for me to empathize with myself now. But if you had told me I would be like this, become this person, even as late as two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I would have looked at you as if something was wrong with you.
It’s funny how one incident can change the entire trajectory of your life. I started to study in a seminary, study Masters in Divinity. But now, I am out of my church, out of any and all connections with the Christians of this world that I have engaged with all my life, at least for the last 13 years. Why?
Because now I understand that they were not really who they portrayed themselves to be. They were pretenders. Their true self came out when they elected Donald Trump. That is the real, harsh, bleeding truth of this century.
So, I encourage you to write. Journal your life. Consider telling your story. Consider making it a book. We need books. We need more stories of truth. Lots and lots of stories. In fact everybody’s story if possible.
So that we can give a clear picture to ChatGPT. Or whatever else comes after that. Which can then analyze and show us the true picture of our life, our existence on earth. Beyond religion, culture, tradition, the bounds of society—the outstanding absolute truth only!
Then we can start talking. Then we can start making a society based off the truths of this century. Based on how we are actually living our lives rather than what scriptures and society insists that we do. Then we can all start living life on earth as we were meant to live. Without fear or compulsion. And with love. Only pure remarkable peaceful truthful honest sincere love!
Right now, if you ask it any question, ChatGPT only tells of what is the common belief. If we ask it any questions based on the truths of our lives, even ChatGPT frowns, just like religion does. So we need everybody’s story.
Are you a prisoner, we need yours too. What took you inside the walls of the prison? Did you shoot somebody who was giving you a hard time? Did you shoot for a common cause? Or did you shoot because you were a privileged kid who had access to guns easily? We need your story too. Whose fault was it that you ended up there? Was it entirely yours?
So we can understand the intricacies of life with more clarity. More openness. More freedom. More courage. Maybe that will make us more accepting of the truths about our lives.
What we know now is very one sided information. Only what we have heard from religion, scriptures, social structure, culture and tradition. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes. In every one of our lives. Ask the cops. Ask the soldiers, the veterans. Ask the illegal immigrants.
Ask the victims of abuse. They all have stories to tell that can make you close your ears even as they are getting started. Their truths cannot be digested by all.
But we need to hear them. We need to know the truths that exist in this world as they are in order to sort them out and find solutions together as one. We are not hearing the complete story.
Our ignorance is making us turn a deaf ear, a blind eye to their truths and not giving them a fair shot at opportunities. DEI initiatives were good but they are not enough!
Some people require more assistance than others. Some people need a lot of assistance. Their voices need to be heard and understood by all. That will be fair play. Wouldn’t it? For all?
What we believe as truth today is not entirely true. For example, holding down a woman in a marriage to an unfaithful spouse in the name of virtue is highly hurtful. That is abuse in itself. Harassment.
Most times women don’t even understand that they are being abused or in an abusive relationship for a long time. By the time they realize it, they have already lost their youthfulness, their glamour, their tenderness, in cases like mine—their career, everything.
Instead they have rough scaly skin on the palms of their hands out of having to do dishes every day even when the dishwasher works perfectly fine, I had to. These things happen. So I want you to write. Write your truths. Write your stories.
Consider writing these truthfully honestly to yourself. Give yourself love while writing it. Abundant love. Consider writing this as a story not for the world but for yourself first, then your child, maybe grandchildren too.
Maybe you are uncomfortable to tell your truths to them now. Don’t spare anything. Narrate as you would to them. It’s your story. You deserve to tell your story as you see it from your perspective.
We have all faltered at some point in our lives. We have failed— some once, some multiple number of times. Why? Was it due to fear of the unknown? Or lack of understanding? Maybe both? We don’t want to be defined by our failures.
We want to instead find a way to make our failures a success one way or another. In the pursuit of happiness, joy, success, life. We want to revisit experiences that brought us life. Or seek new adventures when the status quo fails.
Many times we seek pleasures behind closed concealed chambers because we don’t want anybody mistaking us, looking down upon us. We have a name, a face, a reputation. We don’t want to lose that. It matters.
But apparently that is not enough for us. We seek pleasures beyond the home. Especially if we can easily get it without alerting anybody, quietly, nothing like it.
Have you been there? Done that? Why? What are you lacking in life? Or could it be because you are greedy for more? I don’t think that would be the case. Could it be because you have also been deprived? I have seen cases.
We need to know their stories. What makes them seek pleasures outside the home. What have they been lacking? So write. Write a book. Write your story. Tell the truth as it is, barring nothing!
Let them discover these treasures after you die, if need be. If you cannot discuss them now, while you are still alive. After you are gone, this will be your legacy. Your treasures. Your inheritance, you will be leaving them to read and get to know you closer whenever they miss you terribly.
Consider writing for them. Leave your legacy to them. Let them learn from your life. From your sorrows. From your sins. From your joys too. From your mischiefs. From your playfulness. Remind them through your words how they enjoyed you when you were alive.
Consider writing about your life. Why am I promoting this? Because it’s the truth!
Consider writing primarily for your own self, more than for others.
Consider writhing down every rage, every disappointment, every discomfort, every lust, every anger, every joy, everything. Know yourself. Understand who you are first. Then we can think about the world.
Can you handle it? Do you know yourself? How much? Get to know! Demand it! Then perhaps, just perhaps! You will understand the world. You will see the same world in better light. You will learn to empathize.
Consider mine: I want to say this is to my dad, my pastor, my Bible study mentor and group, my every relative who indulged in don’t-ing me. I want to tell them this:
I want to ask you this. Why did you tell me—you can’t do this, you can’t do that, don’t do this, don’t do that and so on? Has your don’t protected you? Has it saved you? Has it constructed you? Has it given you peace? Joy, satisfaction with your life? Fulfillment? Has it led you on the path of righteousness and kept you there always?
If it didn’t, then why did you don’t me? Who gave you the authority to rule over me threatening me punishment if I didn’t obey you? Did you always obey everything your parents told you not to do?
Your job as a parent, elder, pastor, teacher was to tell me the truth. Period. For example, you could say—this is what you will get if you indulge in this act. Or If you lie, you will have consequences. It’s your job to tell me that.
But if you say don’t, you are taking away my privilege of experimenting and learning for myself the truth as it is. The hard truth. The dirty truth. The ugly truth. You could have tried to persuade me, to convince me but threatening me with punishment was never your job. You had no right to do that to me.
Your job was to act like the Montessori teacher just gently directing without really teaching but being present and available to make sure my experiments don’t kill me or wound me fatally.
Instead, in your laziness, (yes, I’ve done it too to my daughter while also realizing my mistake), you chose to push fear into my nervous system and look where it led me?
If I don’t learn by experience when young, don’t you think I would be curious to do the same when i am older and you are not here to don’t me anymore?
Instead of that, if you had let me fall down, scrape a knee, and run to you with tears in my eyes, you could have easily told me—told you so while washing away the wound and applying bandaid and it would have made me understand why your warning meant wisdom.
Instead you chose to apply fear on me by don’t-ing me and you went one step further to scare me with punishments and look where it led me instead?
Don’t you think there will be consequences for don’t-ing me? Like me finding out at age 48, that I have lived a whole half century of life in misery.
When I could have tested out everything under the sun in my youthful years and learnt for myself which is the truth and which is a lie. Which is wise and which is foolish.
But by insisting on your don’t, you sucked the life out of me. You made me fear you. Fear my life. Fear everybody. Stay shallow. Unable to breathe, live, thrive, enjoy my life as I was meant to do.
Why didn’t you allow me to even fall in love? Why such cruelty? What did you and your culture achieve doing that? I’ll tell you what it achieved.
It made men stick to their moms when they should have been sticking to their wives instead. That’s very prevalent in Indian culture. It’s not a standalone experience.
It’s whoever got brainwashed by their moms due to their fears and jealousy over their daughter-in-laws. Would they be doing that if they had fallen in love and married for love instead?
I didn’t even understand it was my life, my choice then! I just blindly obeyed everything you said because I trusted in you to lead me to clear waters.
Shouldn’t you have told me the truth at least for trusting you? That you were blind too? Didn’t you know the truth?
You were my age when I was in college falling in love. If I know now, wouldn’t you have known then? Why didn’t you let me be me?
See now! How much I am suffering! How much I have been suffering all my life because of you? Why didn’t you follow truth?
You sucked the life out of me by saying don’t and now I want to give back to myself what I never got all these years because of your infamous don’t! Is this what you wanted for me? Are you happy now?
One person started all the don’ts in the name of culture, religion, whatever and everybody down the lane suffered and still do! Only those who understood this clearly stood apart, kept courage, faced fearlessly and won or saved their marriages. And that usually happened in families where the son was not the only son.
Imagine what would happen if all people all over the world wrote their stories and fed them to ChatGPT. Won’t that shift the whole perspective and the whole narrative in the direction of truth? Can you imagine what that can do to this world? Won’t it shake it up like a bottle of good medicine? For the common good? How about healing the world, for instance?
Truth: It can go a long way. Are you ready for the ride?
Think about this.
Peace ✌️
So beautifully written. So heartbreaking.