Memoir, Lying, Confubulation, and Spirit. Part 3

The more I think about lying, the more the pieces of my life start to fall into place. First of all, renaming lying confabulation is an amazing feeling. Lying is a slap across the face. Lying is a moral failure. Lying is a black mark against the entry to heaven and/or trustworthy relationships. Lying is, generally, bad.

No one I know says, You’re a liar as a compliment. 

But, You’re a confabulator? First of all, no one I know says that (well, except sort of Robyn Gobbel except she left off the you’re a part). 

My life really started to feel like my life when I went to NYC with the sole intention of writing my memoir.

My confabulation. 

I dedicated time and resources to something, and dedicating a concentrated three months and nine thousand dollars or so, in my mind, makes that thing important. (Living in NY is expensive!—hell! Living is expensive, especially when you spend all your time writing and no time “making money”.)  

I self-published and then started teaching other people how to do what I did, how to tell their story. How to confabulate. 

When I started playing that game for real, the confabulating game, the fill-in-the-blanks-as-makes-sense-to-me game, joy came to town.

It took me almost four years to feel better than okay about having a book of my truth out in the world because really it was precursor to having myself out in the world. 

I wrote my story so I could walk into the room, complete. 

It went like this: I wrote my book; I moved back to California and had increasingly bad intestinal problems for the next four years. I felt both bad and good. I had told my story. I was real. I knew in my heart this was a good thing, but my body/mind was having to catch up. I was afraid. I was so messy. So dirty. I partly still believed I wasn’t good enough to keep.

I met Pam Cordano and we started doing retreats for adopted people and life just got better and better because I had more and more mirrors out in the world that reflected me accurately. There is less need to lie when your outer world matches your inner world. Less need to confabulate because your life is starting to look like the lies, the confabulations, you felt you needed to tell.

And then I ended up living on Spirit Hill Farm and my whole outside world was a mirror of me: alive, messy, and so, so dirty. So real. I tried to control Spirit Hill. I tried to trim every tree, every plant. I have callouses on my hands now and, in the mornings, they are so stiff it’s hard to pick anything up. 

I worked fiercely for months, and yet Spirit Hill remained wild. I was either going to refuse Spirit Hill, refuse the spirit of Spirit Hill, and move on because I could not tame it, could not feel safe or at home in a place that would not be controlled, or I was going to surrender to the truth of the place: it was wild. It was not good. It was not bad. It just was.

This was the same experience I’d had that had finally allowed me to write my book. The story itself had felt so overwhelming, so unmanageable, so unsafe, so wild that I could not find my way in. 

Listen carefully:

I was in. 

I am in. 

I am the story. I am Spirit Hill. 

It’s like a party trick where someone has a painful black door of lost in her torso and she spends her whole life running from it, and then one day she becomes going-to-die exhausted, and she stops, faces the door and discovers it opens. She discovers she can slip her whole self through the door, basically diving head first through this door of lost, through herself, into a new world. 

You can give birth to yourself! You just have to go through the doorway of lost. Of no. Of whatever it is that does not see you and your story for what they are: miracles. Of things worth attention.

What does this look like in a more concrete way? You become your own fascination. You allow yourself to study yourself with curiousity instead of recrimination. You become committed to proving to yourself once and for all that you are worthy of universal positive regard. You realize time sitting down organizing your thoughts so you can get the story of you down in a way that feels resonant to you is more important than earning extra money for new clothes. 

You realize that your diving into the source of the lies, the confabulations, is more important than most things because we are talking about source energy here. We are talking writing your way to a mirror of truth instead of settling for survival. 

When you lie, when you confabulate, write these things down. Make these statements gateways through which you can see who you are and what you want. They are not shame points. They are bright lights of information, calling to you.

All you have to do is stop running and listen. 

Take a deep breath. Exhale. Let your jaw relax. Let your belly soften. Look around the room. You are safe.

Now begin.