Tag Archives: Relationships

Day 205: The Struggle

I’m really struggling with this honesty thing.  It feels… emotionally dangerous.  It’s not that I’ve blatantly lied.  I haven’t.  I’ve just stopped sharing so much.

I get it now.  I get why people don’t want to openly share their thoughts and feelings, why they hide behind constructed personas and superficial chatter.  I don’t want to share either.  I’m tired of feeling vulnerable, of hurting.  I’m tired of being the only person in a group willing to expose my underbelly, of feeling so incredibly alone when the people around me won’t make eye contact–when their bodies shift uncomfortably in reaction to my openness.

And I sometimes wonder, why am I doing this?

In the past months I’ve made several attempts to write a new blog post only to end up obsessively editing, re-writing and eventually trashing what I had written.  Part of this has to do with my way of coping.  When life feels rocky and uncertain (as it has these past few months), I withdraw socially and spend most of my time quietly ruminating over every nuance of the life-stuff that’s bothering me.  This makes it especially difficult to write publicly.

The other reason is that I’m in a romantic relationship again, and I have so many contrary feelings about it that most times I don’t know what to think.  Really, I’m just afraid of getting hurt again.  And splashing about my deepest thoughts and feelings here seems like a recipe for relationship failure.

Someone recently asked me if I still think honesty is sexy and whether my life is more peaceful now.  Sexy?  Yes.  Peaceful?  Hell no.

8 Comments

Filed under 100% Honesty Project

Day 99: Success in Slow Motion

I’ve been away from writing for so long I feel as though I need to report to you everything that has happened in my absence.  In truth, I don’t.  Suffice it to say that being unemployed is a mixed bag of  relaxed freedom and paralyzing stress.

I have spent these past weeks consumed in problem solving, which means my mental energies have been consciously or unconsciously devoted to figuring out four important areas of my life: income (basic survival), housing (selling my stuff and moving in with roommates), transportation (public transit vs. new car) and creative purpose (what am I doing with my life?)

And if that wasn’t enough, romance has shoved itself into the equation.  It seems as though the day I decided I was done with dating, it started raining men. Thirty-something, single, men.  I know I shouldn’t be complaining but… really?  Now?

So as you can imagine, my mental faculties have been somewhat consumed, and I’ve returned to my usual mental hiccuping (i.e. any combination of stuttering, tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, kindergarten vocabulary, mid-conversation memory loss and a general sense of intellectual dullness).  This has proven to be a major hurdle for my writing and my ego.

It’s been little over a month, and I’ve made such slow progress.  When I decided to quit my job, I hadn’t anticipated the car fire, nor had I factored the cost of buying its replacement into my expense planning.  I am getting close to reaching my last dime and the sense of self-assuredness I had when I first submitted my resignation has vanished.

I still don’t regret quitting.  But I also don’t have any answers.

I wish I could write here telling you that everything in my life is fabulous now, that I could say “Wow!  See?  It all worked out so perfectly!” but I can’t because it’s not.  I think that what’s so charming about success stories is that the authors get to fast forward through the days of drudgery, the weeks on end when they deeply doubted themselves, their frivolity and their impulsive decision-making.  I’ve avoided writing you because I want to do that too.  I want to fast forward.

But there’s no place to fast forward to.  Once these problems are solved new ones will pop up.

On second thought, there are many ways my life is fabulous right now.  I’m happier than before.  While I don’t have money, I do have love and support and fun and laughter.  I’ve had the flexibility and freedom to spend quality time with friends and family, and remember how fortunate I am to have such incredibly kind and generous people in my life.  Too, this adventure has given me opportunities to meet even more amazing people.  So things are good, even if I can’t measure them with a financial yard stick.

For now, I’ll focus on writing and developing my own biz, but mostly on selling my stuff and sending out resumes (because I really need to pay next month’s rent).  If you know anyone who is looking to hire, I make for one awesome social worker ;)

10 Comments

Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy, The Truth Experiment

Day 69: How Honesty Builds Courage

This was my Weekend

I stand watching four handsome firemen extinguish my car engine, which had spontaneously caught fire at 70 mph on the freeway.

Are you f-ing kidding me?

Nope.

That’s really what happened.

Don’t worry.  I’m all in one piece.  But, I must be freaking out.  Right?  I mean, I have no job, and now I am sans vehicle in a city that has a crappy public transit system, which makes any kind of temp work or job hunting immeasurably more difficult. Time to panic, right? Continue reading

24 Comments

Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy, The Truth Experiment

Day 42: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus

Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus

The Minimalists

I met these great guys last Saturday.  Their names are Josh and Ryan and they write a blog about minimalism.  Well.  It’s not really about minimalism.  It’s about living a meaningful life and how making money and acquiring stuff doesn’t bring the fulfillment or satisfaction we think it will.

Ryan and Josh are on a tour to promote their new book, meet other cool minimalists, like moi, and that’s how I got to meet them.  Saturday they came to Phoenix and spoke about how they’ve changed their lives; they spoke about letting go of possessions and fancy corporate titles, about living with less and creating more. Continue reading

31 Comments

Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy, The Truth Experiment

Time to Get Naked

Whenever taking on a new project or making a major life change, my thinking becomes clouded and fuzzy.  In conversation, I stutter over finding the right words to express myself and, in mid-sentence, will forget what I was going to say (that’s always impressive on a first date).

This very thing has been happening to me lately, and it’s interfered with my writing too (as you may have noticed).  At first, I thought I wasn’t writing because I had run out of ideas.  The truth is that what’s been consuming my brain power is the thing I am most excited and most fearful of writing about. Continue reading

21 Comments

Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy, The Truth Experiment

Day 11: Honesty Project — Why Weird is Brave

lindsey fox

I’ve been sick all day which has given me a lot of time to do nothing but watch movies, suck on 27 cough drops and lay around thinking about life.  Today, I was prepared to write a long post about self-awareness, but instead I want to write about an idea that has been haunting my thoughts for a few weeks now: being weird.

Growing Up

Like everyone else, I grew up in a culture from which I learned valuative norms, that is, which things are good or bad, right or wrong, weird or normal.  As a child I saw my friends strive to fit within these norms, as did I, in order to avoid conflict and receive love and acceptance from parents and other authority figures.

On some level I thought fitting in would make me happy even though it oftentimes meant squashing my true nature–my creativity, intuition, ambitions, etc.  Many of my friends were much better at squashing than I was, and I often felt like a Weirdo. Continue reading

14 Comments

Filed under The Truth Experiment

Day 9: The 100% Honesty Project

Clay Chimenea

It has been a few days since my last Truth Experiment Update and I have oodles to share.   So far, the experience has been mostly positive, though at times, uncomfortable.  I’ll start with the positives.

Honesty and Family

Last Saturday was Cousin Night at Ben’s House.  Picture this: 5 cousins, 2 family friends and a black cat gathered around an outside patio table, lots of beer, a few cigarettes, grilled bratwurst and fire in a terracotta clay chimenea.

I am the first to arrive, followed by my cousin, Kamryn.  With a gleam in her eye, the first thing she says to me is  “Oooh! I have so many questions!!”  Naturally, my cousins  have been following the blog and find the Truth Experiment an opportune time to get me to “spill the dirt”.  I say okay. Continue reading

7 Comments

Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy