As I thought about the way we paint people, how we are taught at a very young age to temper our truths, what we see and how we feel, how we not only learn to paint ourselves in false colors, but others as well.
We tell little children it is ‘not nice’ to call a fat person fat.
It is not nice to say that someone who is mean is mean.
That it is not nice to say grandma made you feel bad.
We are teaching them, It is not nice to speak your truth…
And, speaking your truth will make others feel bad.
Is that right? How can that be? How in the world are the child’s words and feelings put aside to protect the mean or fat person?
And then we wonder why they don’t come and tell us when a mean Uncle so and so did bad things to them. They have been taught that their feelings don’t matter and that the truth is not kind.
I am quite certain the fat person knows she/he is fat.
And perhaps it may be better for us to engage in a conversation about it.
When I began speaking my truth, it felt like I was doing something bad.
Like I had broken the ‘golden’ rule of kindness, that I had turned a corner into the forbidden territory, and all hell would break lose.
And it did, the pretty painted picture shattered and crumbled.
I lost friends and family when I spoke out loud and became like a very very stubborn child. I refused to give up what I had seen, how I felt and how the other person’s actions affected me.
For once in my life, I looked at me in truth and how the world around me felt to me, looked to me…and my coloring people crayons disappeared.
And the paints I used to tone down what I saw and how I felt…completely dried up.
I then discovered an incredible freedom and how easy it was to not have to come up with an excuse for others or worry how my truth would make them feel.
Byron Katie’s book, “Loving What is” showed me how it was okay and actually a very sacred place to be.
I was walking with God in reality.
I saw what God saw.
He didn’t paint a sunset over to make it into a bird, nor a tree into a river. He kept them all in their natural states. I could then see the perfection in everything.
A mean person is mean.
An unhappy person is unhappy.
A homeless man has no home.
A biting dog bites.
A pedophile abuses children.
A drunken person drinks.
A neglectful mother neglects her children.
I didn’t try to make any of the above different, it was impossible and not my job. I retired as the painter to make their lives appear kinder and feel better to me.
Instead I felt them as they were…I opened myself up to feel all the things I had previously painted, I stripped them down so only their truths shone forth.
I felt what it feels like to have a pedophile father, a neglectful mother. I felt it all wash over me removing my own paints of being normal and okay.
Stripped bare I stood with a family minus the pretty paint.
Its unvarnished rawness of glaring truths…
It wasn’t pretty but it was my truth…and I didn’t have the strength or the desire to pick up a brush and cover it up.
I let it lay there in all its ugly perfect glory… the raw and perfect truth.
