Powerful. Right on Time. Truth.

We are all dying of some untouched, unrealized internal loneliness, grasping onto the bits of writing and music that speak in the way we otherwise cannot. We’re suffering from anxiety and depression and loneliness and uncertainty and fear and failure mostly because we have to continue to paint an outward picture of the opposite. 

Nobody is honest and so nobody is finding anybody who loves them for them, because they aren’t being who they are. There are only finding people who love their shells, which, as we all know, easily break.

So many of our relationships hinge on whether or not we continually fulfill a set of expectations that we often know about, but sometimes do not. Our fear of honesty and change is rooted in no longer being acceptable or wanted or held in high regard by the people who claim to love us. 

It’s not “mean” to tell the truth, we’re just not used to hearing anything other than what we want to hear. We’ve chalked anything that isn’t coddling and placating and aligned with our most delusional and comforting thoughts to be “wrong.” 

“Truthfulness” and “meanness” have become synonymous because so long as people aren’t doing and saying what we want to see and hear, they’re wrong, and they’re hurting our feelings by, subconsciously or not, making us feel unaccepted, unwanted, and unvalidated (because we’re only finding those things externally.)

At our core, there is only light. I guarantee there is not one person you wouldn’t love if you knew their true story, their whole story, if you lived a day or a year or a lifetime in their shoes. 

Often the kindest things we experience in a life are the moments in which someone cared more about who we were than how our feelings would be hurt to tell us the truth that saved us or showed us some otherwise invisible reality. 

Often the way we are kindest to ourselves is by saying “no.” Often the things we are most grateful for are the ones that were (and are) the most trying, the most deeply compelling, the most wholly changing, even if, at first, they aren’t necessarily comfortable.

So you should say no when you want to say no. You should speak precisely and kindly and with understanding but directness when you see a friend struggling to make a simple choice that will have a profound effect on their entire quality of life, instead of walking away and discussing with everybody else but them. 

You should leave your house if in it, you’re not wanted. There are ways to pay the rent, there is no way to make somebody love you when they don’t. You should say how you feel before it stays in the darkness so long that it becomes the foundation on which the rest of your life is built — and then collapses through. 

You should tell the people you love that you love them. You should tell the people you don’t that you don’t, and let them find people who really do. You should dig deep into the untouched abyss of yourself, and see what you come out with. 

First it will be the unhealed wounds you didn’t know you had. Second it will be the light and love and passion under which they rest. Third it will be the desire to take those things and run with them and build something remarkable. You should evaluate your choices not in light of how other people will perceive them, but how in line with your deepest, truest self they are.

You should rise and say “this is who I am, even if you’ll crucify me for it,” in the very way so many religious and political and social idols and icons have, (even if their fans and followers are the very ones who will do the crucifying.)

You should give to others what you most need. Which, more often than not, is to say the following: you are not loved by everybody, but that does not mean you are not loved at all. You are not the most beautiful, but being the most beautiful is not what matters most. 

You are bound by nothing but your own fear, so you will not find freedom anywhere but within yourself. Everybody suffers. Not everybody comes out on the other end shimmering and ready to let that light reverberate through the dense and otherwise impermeable darkness. 

Not everybody has the guts to be truthful, but everybody has the capacity to. And the greatest irony, the most profoundly cunning thing of all, is that the very love and passion and acceptance we are seeking resides nowhere else but within our own unbridled honesty. So go to it, and let it finally breathe.

-Brianna Wiest