Why

I have wondered what it is like for a man to go out with a woman who wears heavy makeup and for him to see her the first time bare-faced. What’s it like for him? What’s it like for her to show what she looks like without a mask? One could assume she wore the makeup to make herself more attractive, so is she then less attractive when she doesn’t wear it? When I was at a movie shoot once, I watched the make-up person come in and repaint the actresses face after a sex scene. This means that the pillow talk we watch after the sex scene has her face just as foundationed, blushed, and mascared as before the actor and actress rolled all over each other for some time. I’m not even talking about her much work went into her hair. The actress looked perfect before they starting kissing, and she looked perfect after they’d finished. 

By perfect I mean airbrushed, without noticeable flaws. 

I am telling you all of this to make a point. Telling your story is a way of taking off your mask, showing the world and those you love who you really are under the paint of hustling for approval, acceptance, safety. If a woman (or a man) washes off their make-up and shows up for another bare-faced, and if the response is disinterest, disappointment or disgust, well, this is where you get to choose. Do you want to hide your real self your whole life or do you want to be you? 

Faith and self-love are helpful here. Surely someone will like the true you. It’s exhausting to be around people you have to perform for in order to be accepted. It seems to me that many people can do this act for a few decades, and then at around forty or fifty they run out of gas and don’t have the same burning need to keep up the act. For me, one of the best things about getting older is that I’m more concerned with how I feel about myself than how you feel about me.

If you don’t like yourself, it can be harder to find others who do. This, however does not mean you will be alone. There are many people who love a person who does not love themselves because the former has all sorts of bandwidth for bad behavior and narcissism. If you can’t find it in yourself to love who you are, then someone else can take that spotlight and relish in the attention you’ll shower on them instead of on yourself. You’ll be like a puppet buttering someone else’s toast for the rest of your life. 

Now that I’ve danced around things a bit, here’s the real answer, the one you might not like: The reason why you would tell your story when you are afraid you will lose those you love when they read it is so you will lose them. 

I’m sorry. Truly. I know this could be a jagged pill to swallow, but you are damaging your soul and your brain and your connective tissue and heaven knows what else with your act. Hiding your true self burns up precious glucose and leaves you a shell pretending to do this one life wholeheartedly. I can’t watch you do it. I want to see you. I didn’t come all this way, from the land of sperm and egg, to watch you be someone else. I could have stayed inside where it was nice and warm instead of venturing out into the wide world to meet you and meeting a strained puppet instead. 

What’s the worst thing that could happen if you showed the world your true self? Maybe everyone including your self would hate you and leave you all alone until you withered and died? (Well, then you wouldn’t have to worry about things anymore because you’d be dead. So there’s that part of the bright side.) 

Here’s the trick. Can you imagine a seed sprouting into a daisy, and the daisy taking one look down at its stem, its leaves, can you imagine the daisy feeling the pull of its roots in the earth and then saying, “This is garbage. I am garbage. My stem is short and my leaves are shaped funny and my roots feel fucked up. Look at all those other daisies around me. They are perfect and I am not. I don’t have the right to be here. I hope I die. This is too painful, being not good enough. NO!!

I believe with every fiber of my body that our body was created to be loved. I believe that hate and disregard and unkindness are not true states of being—I believe they are the results of a deficit—of love, of food, of safety, of friendship, of nurturing. What this means is that when you show yourself your true self, you walk through the door of empathy, compassion, acceptance and love. The universe will be screaming YOU GO! How does the universe scream like that? It brings someone into your life to tell you they think you are amazing. It changes the lens through which you see the world and yourself and suddenly you see love. It gives you a raise. It lets you sleep at night. It has a stranger bend down to pick up the glove you dropped and hand it to you with a smile. It gives you new ideas, ideas that feel like sunlight and stars. 

You tell your story so you can regain your awareness of your place in things. Front and center, just like everyone else.  

How

How do you get yourself to go to the doctor when you need to get a shot? First you make an appointment, then when the day comes, you get in your car or you walk or take the bus to the doctor’s office…

 You get the gist. One step at a time. 

Try this: Pretend you are sitting at a table with a dear friend, or if you aren’t sure how dear any of your friends are, pick some famous person you admire and imagine the person is there to hear your story and they have all the time in the world. You have a riveted audience and all you have to do is tell them the story that starts with some form of “Once upon a time,” and ends when you feel done. 

I don’t believe in writer’s block because I don’t believe in talker’s block. When I taught writing at the college level and a student would come to me with “writer’s block” I would ask, “What is it you want to say?” and 100% of the time the kid would have some sort of answer. No one ever just shrugged their shoulders and walked away. Even if the answer is “I don’t know,” “I don’t know what I want to say,” is a fine way to begin. A second sentence always follows because the mind, that chattery thing, just isn’t quiet. 

The trick is to say what your mind says to you instead of asking it to hold its thoughts while you try to think of what it is you are supposed to say. The trick is to let yourself be you on the page instead of putting makeup on and trying to be someone else. 

I want to tell you something. My mother saved some of her journals in which she wrote about an affair she had in her 40s and asked her friend to mail them to me at what felt like the right time after my mother died. Her friend waited five years and then mailed them to me after I wrote and published my own book. I was not happy reading those journals: I was furious. I had known about the affair and my mother had denied that it had happened when she was alive. It created a wedge between us, her secret life. I so would have loved to be included in her life instead of being handed the shellacked version of it.

Keats said truth is beauty. I believe that. Even if the truth is that you killed someone. It’s still better than telling your kids you went out for some gum. I know, I know, you can argue that sometimes it’s better not to say everything you did. I get it. Sometimes the damage truth can cause doesn’t feel worth the telling. 

But I would argue that if it’s your story that’s at issue, and that if your afraid you will lose people if you tell it, the fact is you’ve already lost them, and the only thing that’s really, truly yours is the very thing you are refusing to stand by, own, and represent.

Why not go Nike on your life and just do it?

 I found it very helpful to imagine I was writing to a loving ear. I made it just an ear because a body would have had a mouth, and I wanted to put the focus entirely on being heard, not on my listening to what another thought about the story I was telling. When I write, I imagine the silver river of truth I can now feel running the length of my spine travel out through my mouth (as I write) and into this loving ear who wants to hear all of my story, every word, an ear that hungers for the truth of me. 

I didn’t feel the silver river of truth until I was fifty years old and facing the fact that even though I had moved out of my apartment, quit my job, gotten myself deep in debt in order to finally write a book I’d been trying to write for decades, the book would not come out of me. Early one morning, I stood in the middle of the quiet road and texted my friend something along the lines of “I can’t do it. I don’t know what my story is. I don’t know who my audience is. I don’t know who would even care what I have to say. And if I keep writing, I’m afraid I’m going to say I have worth, and I’m not sure I’m ready to do that.” The last sentence surprised me. It was so vulnerable and true. Normally I would have erased it and not shown that part of myself to another, but I was waving the white flag of surrender and didn’t care anymore. I pressed send and waited for him to write counter arguments. 

Instead, as I waited for a car to come and run me over and end my misery, a message came back to me from my friend. “That’s your voice,” he said. “Keep going.” 

That was my voice!? That thing I’d learned to keep hidden? 

This was the most excellent news! That voice had so much to say!! I could feel the clarity of it in my body, the silver river of ease springing out of the dark tension I’d thought was keeping me safe. 

It’s not that writing became painless, but it did become something that felt like breath, my breath. It felt real. I realized that if anyone in my life was opposed to me breathing, if anyone wanted me to hold my breath, they were dangerous and it would only behoove my sense of safety in my body and in the world if I lost them. And I was able to finish the book. I did lose some people, but no one who really mattered. 

I’m not even sure if I lost the ones I did because they fell away from me or because I fell away from them. 

It doesn’t seem to matter.