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
Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy, The Truth Experiment
Some days, from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep, are just plain bad. No matter how much positive thinking I do, I can’t shake the negativity. It’s like the 24-hr-cold of emotion.
Today was such a day.
I’m not telling you this to get sympathy. I don’t expect you to care. Honestly. But I noticed that I deal with these kinds of days differently than I used to, and I hope that my transparency can be of some use. Continue reading
Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy, The Truth Experiment
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.
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
Filed under The Truth Experiment
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.
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
Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy
A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie. ~Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment
Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind. ~Austin O’Malley Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
Today is Day Four of my Truth Experiment (or not telling another lie for the next year). I already consider myself to be an unusually honest person, but taking on this project has raised my awareness of everything that comes out of my mouth. Several times each day, I have had to interrupt myself to correct my inaccurate statements. It’s been tedious, but eye-opening. Continue reading
Filed under 100% Honesty Project, Honesty is sexy
After writing my last post, I thought “Oh god. This blog has already become depressing”. But that’s not what I want.
I don’t want my writing to be yet one more platform for people to feel bad about the world they live in. Nor do I want this to become the narcissistic catharsis that so many other blogs become. So, I asked myself: “what do I want to come from this?”
These are the answers that came up:
I want to help people
I want people to feel better about their lives
I want them to feel more connected and less lost, confused, or lonely
I want people to know that it’s okay to be honest, real and open, and that their true selves are completely lovable
I want people to become more self-aware so that they can make the kinds of choices that lead to richer and more joyful lives
I want to subject myself to a social experiment of 100% transparency, 100% self-acceptance and 0% shame, and document the entire thing on this blog.
Whew! All of those statements feel incredibly true, and having put them down has somehow lifted a weight in my body that I hadn’t noticed was there. That very last statement (the one about transparency) scares the bejeesus out of me (literally my arm hairs stood on end when I wrote it) which is a good sign that I absolutely should do it.
*sigh*
Here goes nothin’.
Filed under The Truth Experiment
contact me at : lellefox@gmail.com
