telling the truth
hi friends!
can you believe it? two emails in two weeks?! a regular cadence of updates?!
this year, i’m prioritizing consistency over intensity. I’ll be sharing essays and excerpts from the long-form writing project I’m working on. Writing is my one big thing (OBT) for the year. What’s yours?
Expect an essay later this week. (Need to give myself a pep talk to get it out in the world.) Thank you for all of the encouragement and comments on screaming caterpillar, it meant the world to me.
here’s a refection I wrote about this next chapter of telling the truth, all of it.
love,
sw
p.s. there’s almost 500 of you reading along! this email list has grown one person at a time since the oats & woes days 6 years ago. if you’ve been here since then or just joined last week, thank you all for reading, sharing, & responding.
telling the truth
Despite our best efforts to tell the truth, even this is a hopeless pursuit.
Our memories are feeble and in each retelling, we mold our stories to our liking. We taint them with therapy words, hindsight, perspective. In diffusing and deflecting, we disavow the truth.
No matter how we try, what we create will never be true for everyone. To make something with meaning, you have to be decisive. You must declare this is what it is and this is what it is not. If you try to say everything just right, you end up saying nothing at all.
You can try to write something that is timeless, and still time will pass. Regardless of whether or not you choose to create, life will continue to move around you. Still the world could ruin you.
So if you’re going to create, why not commit to telling the truth as it lives within you?
Telling the truth requires speed. Like a glint of gold in the pan, you have to sweep it out before the river takes it away. Listen to it, believe it. Do not squander the truth to make it palatable.
If we want to say something meaningful, we must write without regard to self-preservation.
“Are you willing to offer yourself up?” a friend asked.
I said yes.
If I wrote in a way that protected myself from everything, I would not write at all.
Still, each time I start to write, I close my eyes and pray. Please let this, this closest thing to truth that I have ever known, be more true than I fear it isn’t. I promise I will tell you how it was to me. This is all I can promise.
Are you willing to offer yourself up?
Say yes again. Each time the truth asks to be told.
quick hits
Location / Time: 2 pm ET in Brighton, Michigan
What I’m Eating: Banza pasta with broccoli & Rao’s sauce (taking inspo from chef Troone)
What I’m Reading: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
What I’m Celebrating: Holly Whitaker’s beautiful newsletter “Being All of It”
liked this essay? you can share on social here.
Thank you for sharing such a vulnerable piece of writing about truth. The last three paragraphs painted a powerful imagery of reaching for assurances that whatever one does to put words onto paper that it is done so in the most human of ways that one can be or act in the moment.