Truth Be Told - Part 3
(Listen here for the soundtrack to this offering)
What if I told you the truth? Carefully, judiciously, and tactfully. What if you had told me the truth? Earnestly, intentionally, and thoughtfully.
To tell the truth is to shame the devil — so the elders say. Though the devil I know bears no shame at all. Telling the truth has showered me in shame, soaking me to the bone, anchoring my anxiety.
Be honest but don't tell the truth.
Where do I begin my story, how do I tell the truth? What is the truth? How can people who’ve never faced truth tell me about honesty? How can they have loved me when they’ve never met me?
I defer my truth until it is safe, you withhold your truth until I have earned it. How can love be defined by honesty when you love me and don’t know me? Am I my own heartbreak? I earned your ‘I love you’, I was steady, I was patient, I was kind. I was honest…enough. What a hollow love that turned out to be like my praying grandmother shielding my mother from safety. Grandma never told Mama ‘I love you’, I think she meant it. I think she told the truth. Mama said ‘don't wear your heart on your sleeve’, I didn’t listen. I didn’t trust that truth.
My Mama said I was too much after she said ‘I love you’. She taught me to pour water from my vase so my flower would shrink and be just the right size for someone else’s. She taught me truth is secondary, you have to survive first. She told me wearing truth is expensive and we can’t afford it. Truth was the pieces of her left over after the light bill was paid, after she put gas in the car, and food on the table. I learned to collect pieces of love and build a mosaic. I learned to make discomfort manageable, I learned to survive in ‘love’ just like my Mama did. It’s true but what’s the use in knowing? Knowing brings me to the feet of ancestors, knowing welcomed each version of Mama back to me, knowing brought me home to be seen, knowing allowed me to see you beyond the mask that grins and lies.
Did your Mama ever say she liked you after she said I love you? Does your curated paper trail of degrees, accolades, and influential connections function well as evidence that you’re good enough and liked? You nor your truth seem impressed by it. You liked that I wasn’t enveloped by the paper trail though your cultivated self image rooted itself there in your struggling marriage to prestige. At onset our meeting was fraught with irreconcilable differences. I wanted to know and excavate truth and you wanted to be a rhetorical orator and myth maker of truth. You were the first and only one to say ‘I love you’…religious folk say ‘the devil is a lie and the truth ain't in you’…or is it? I think it is.
Truth be told…
Truth be told…
Truth be told…
I am an emotional endurance athlete by force and a lover by sheer will. My resilience is birthed from endurance, a utility alchemized with curiosity that wrenches open joy and whimsy. My anxiety is a clingy, insatiable thing but truth telling has been a balm for her unsettled spirit. I am willful, I am hopeful, I am a defiant sentient being. There is no end where I don’t trust the truth that a beginning will always follow.
So — what if we had told each other the truth?
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cover image: “afterglow” (2025) danielle mckinney