Telling the Truth

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”


― Muriel Rukeyser


This question and Rukeyser's answer have always intrigued me, like a Zen koan that plays in my mind underneath the surface chatter.

I know women who tell the truth, seek the truth, and revise the "truth" when it changes. Leading writing groups and being friends with women who keep it real teach me new things about truth-telling every day.

I had an epiphany in a group this weekend:  As a child, I was always the instigator of those awful "truth sessions" at camp that battered our self esteem and left us all feeling bruised.  We were too immature to tell the truth about our own lives; truth was mostly brutal criticism about each other.  I was curious and wanted to plunge beneath the surfaces of who we were--though our skill in doing that was lacking.

All these years later, I still remember the sting of being told that I was flat-chested and wore my socks wrong-side out and "had two left feet" dancing.  I can't remember the "truths" I told that might have stung them just as much.  We were simply attempting to fit ourselves and each other into the only molds we knew.

Now those "truths" are no longer relevant. I'm not flat-chested, I rarely wear socks, and with the right partner, I can dance passably well.

As I've grown older, I've realized that truth-telling is about having the courage to say my truth and risk splitting a little patch of the world wide open, if only for a minute or two.

Telling the truth is not about consensus.  Sadly, I often lack the courage to tell the harder truths--if it means hurting someone else or rupturing a friendship.  Maybe it's because--as we talked about in writing group--women, more than men, have been conditioned to please other people at all cost.  That cost can be high.

We all feel a liberating rush when we find the courage to step outside the lines we've been conditioned to stay inside, when we don't say what "they" want to hear, but what we believe at that moment to be our unvarnished truth.

When a woman has the courage to speak her truth, the world cracks open for those fortunate enough to hear it--even if that world is the size of an egg or a stone.

Approval is overrated.  Agreement is easy--just figure out what "they" want to hear and say that, keep the world as it is.  Tell the truth and you risk the temporary discomfort of living  in a split-wide-open world.