I sat with my old self yesterday and caught a glimpse of how I used to be, how if it weren’t for the truth exploding into our family, where I too would be caught.

I saw her living in two worlds, locking up her truth before entering each side, so a part of her was always in the closet.

And to me the part that gets locked away is the truth, for there will be a price to pay to let it out.  And the price is very large…huge in some cases, your whole family is on the line, if the truth slips out of the closet.

She continues to walk into a church she no longer believes in, to keep her family believing she is there. And her family needs her to arrive so they too can pretend she is still the same girl.

She knows if she doesn’t arrive, if she speaks her truth, her whole world will change.

As I left her yesterday, a song was playing on the radio, and the words filled my jeep, “I am not ready to say good-bye…”

In life we are often asked to pick between staying and not being truthful or leaving with the truth and all it curtails.

When you are raised and believe in a religion that is based on pretending and false facts, and your whole world is comprised of this, you will lose your whole world.

While greeting the truth, you have to say good-bye to your pretend family.  I say pretend, for you will know them by how they respond to your truth, until then, it is all pretend.

In my family of origin, it was built primarily on false facts, the façade and truth hid in the closet.  All then acted, pretending there was no such storage for all the sins she blessed away.

It wasn’t until one sin fell out that the rest came tumbling after and I was overrun with truth.

I am not certain how the rest could just push it all back in and go on pretending, but they did and have.  Their capacity for hiding is much larger than mine. 

While it may seem that they have once again locked the door, I believe that we all get to face our truths some day.

I can’ t know when, nor can I force you to open your door and let them out, to live with them in harmony.

Our truths don’t disappear, just because we fail to look upon them, instead what happens is you live a life without them, a pretend life.

You get to have a pretend father and mother.

You can have pretend sisters and brothers.

You then get pretend security of being surrounded by folks who care.

As I found out, if you open your closet of truth, your pretend family disappears.

Most are not willing to say good-bye to pretend…while I thought they did not want to face the truth.  It isn’t the truth they fear, but the façade of pretend. They truly don’t want to know it is made of up fakeness.

It is better to live in the comfort of fakeness than to live alone with your truth.

Yet who are you without your truths?

“Every exit is an entrance somewhere else. “

~Tom Stoppard