3 Tips for Telling the Truth

Telling the truth used to be hard for me. I’ll be honest—it still is sometimes. In fact, just today I was contemplating how to tell someone a hard truth that’s come up recently. Instead of texting them, I sat down to write this post. There’s one silver lining that’s come out of my history of shying away from uncomfortable truths: I’ve gotten a lot of practice at recognizing all the convoluted strategies I use to lie to myself.

 I use the words “lying” and “honesty” because they’re harsh enough and overt enough to help me clarify my own internal compass. Left unattended, my mind tends to drift into a muddled, wishy-washy ether of doubt and anxiety, and I need blunt words to pull me out of it. But that doesn’t mean every sentiment is split into a lie or a truth. Truths can change. Lies can be prophetic. None of it is unshakeable.

 What we’re really talking about then, is how close or distant we are from the heart of what we mean. There are very good reasons we create distance in our speech. We tell self-deprecating jokes to distance and protect ourselves from the kind of feedback that would really hurt us. We stay on the surface of a tough memory until we feel we have enough strength to go in. We hide vulnerable parts of ourselves from our loved ones, because we don’t want them to stop loving us.

 All these impulses create distance from the emotions we feel in these painful moments. Sometimes that distance is healthy. Sometimes that distance becomes a lie.

 As I wrote my memoir and put parts of my life down on the page, I could see through the language itself how I created distance from what I felt and what was true for me. It took a few drafts, but the more I practiced, the more honest I got.

 The list that follows is a gift from my personal history to yours, so we can all get a little better at writing and saying what we mean. Here are some of the ways I’ve found I create distance in my writing:

Projecting: I write about “you” instead of sticking with “me.” 

This is a tip I picked up from my colleague Tucker Max, who’s taught hundreds of authors how to write with more honesty. He’s a stickler for pointing out how people use “you” when they really mean “I.” For example, check out the difference between these two statements:

 “You will tell the truth when you’re willing to love yourself in your truth.”

 Versus:

 “I started telling the truth when I was willing to love myself in my truth.”

 This is true, by the way. When I decided I wanted to get more raw and honest, the first hurdle I came up against was that I didn’t have compassion for the parts of myself I was trying to hide. Of course I wasn’t being upfront and clear with others; I needed them to think of me a certain way so they would continue to like me and prop me up while I dug out the parts I thought were broken.

 But take a look at the difference in language between those two statements. The first sounds like a bumper sticker, easy to read and just as easy to forget. In the second statement, I own my point of view, and admit the lesson comes from my own experience. It feels more vulnerable to me to write that way, but it feels a lot more powerful, too.

 Projection isn’t just summing up our life lessons in second-person statements; it also happens when we find ourselves writing someone else’s story.

 A few years ago I went to a terrible dentist who told me almost nothing about herself, but while my mouth was propped open for her to repair my cracked front tooth, she told me a string of stories about her daughter who had been struggling with addiction and just got out of rehab and started seeing this guy who might not be so good for her. As soon as my tooth was fixed, I jumped out of her chair, paid, and got the hell out of there. But all I could think about was, what are you addicted to?

It was the worst dental work I’d gotten in my life, but one of the best lessons about owning my story. Now when I find myself writing about other people and how they behaved, I stop and ask: what am I trying to say—or hide—about myself? 

Denial: I think I feel nothing.

Two months into having my driver’s license, I rolled over my mom’s SUV on a windy dirt road in the dark. I walked away with just one scratch on me: a deep gash on the forearm that I raised to protect myself from a shattering driver’s-side window. A week later, I wrote in my journal, “I haven’t thought to write about the accident in here. I guess that’s because it wasn’t that big a deal.”

 Oh, sweetheart.

Denial is an important, powerful, self-protective mechanism. Denial is what made it possible for me to go back to high school after a few days and feel relatively normal around all my peers who hadn’t just nearly killed themselves.

 The problem isn’t that denial exists; it’s that for me, it became a permanent solution for a while. I let myself accept that line in my journal, and I didn’t revisit those emotions for almost two decades. Meanwhile, sitting within that memory was an amazing gift: yes, I nearly died, but I drew on some incredible resilience that night. I experienced the most intense terror of my life, but I got myself to safety. Right alongside the fear I didn’t want to feel again was the strength that pulled me through it. Denial pulled me away from my fear, but it pulled me away from my strength, too.

 Now, when I find myself thinking something I’m writing doesn’t really matter, I know that’s denial speaking, and it’s time to dig in.

 Coming out of denial is confusing. It takes me a while to figure out: okay, if I actually did feel something here, what was it? The emotions I try to label often don’t feel like they fit at first. I focus on sensations instead: I feel a burning sensation in my throat. Ah—I’m pretty sure that’s shame.

 I practice trusting that whatever comes up is the right answer for now, even if I’m not sure why yet. Even if it evolves. After all, that’s what emotions do—they move, and they move us. 

Victimization: I think someone “made me” feel something.

This one still regularly trips me up. Just this morning I wrote in my journal that talking to a particular person about their anxieties made me feel anxious. I crossed it out and wrote instead, “When they talk about their anxiety, I remember how anxious I am.”

The rewrite helped me realize they didn’t intend for me to feel anxious. Quite the opposite, in fact: they were probably hoping I would feel secure and compassionate, so I could talk them down from the ledge. When I recognize they didn’t make me feel anything, I realize my emotions are entirely my own.

Someone can only “make me” do or feel something if I believe I have no agency. Philosophers and neuroscientists debate this point endlessly, but I believe I always have agency, whether I know how to use it in a given moment or not. I can always come back to myself and respond from a place of integrity. This doesn’t mean I always do; these things take practice.

One of the most effective ways I’ve found for getting out of a sense of victimhood and into a sense of agency is to watch my language. When I notice I say someone “made me” do something, I rewrite the sentence: “when ___ happens, I ___.”

Sense of agency restored in a flash.

Change “they made me feel anxious” to “when they say that, I feel anxious,” and suddenly I can do something about it. I can calm myself down. I can extract myself from the conversation. I’m not at their whim.

I didn’t make this up, by the way—it comes from Marshall Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication, which is one of the best books I’ve read on developing self-awareness, and by extension, better writing. 

Practicing truth leads to practicing compassion.

Do you find yourself resorting to all three of these tactics on a daily basis? Yeah, me too. We’re not the only ones; listen closely, and you’ll hear people using this kind of distance in their speech all the time.

When I write, I almost always need two drafts—not because I didn’t use good enough words or sentence structures in the first draft, but because I usually don’t get all the way to my truth on the first take. I write in order to practice.

And here’s the real end goal of this practice: when I get honest about how I really feel, I accept the truth of who and how I am.

Have you noticed other tactics you use for creating distance between you and your truth? Send me a line—I’d love to learn about them.