In light of my customary July break, I’ve moved (again) to attend an MFA in Creative Nonfiction—a delightfully fraught and existentially questionable genre. Come next month, I’ll be spending the following three years endlessly writing. (Not entirely unlike the years preceding.)
Using my extensive background in human behavior, I’ll be singularly fixated on what I believe to be among the most fascinating notions of man: The Truth.
While there are nearly innumerable expressions aimed at the complexity of this idea in every language, below are a couple of my favorites in English.
The truth shall set you free—but first it will piss you off.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Far as I can tell, I’ve been musing on the energetic power of language to express the shades of ideas like “truth” for about as long as I’ve been able to talk. Now, in the twilight of my twenties, I’ve been reexamining the evidence used to tell the story of my little life.
I’ve been preparing to close a chapter that I’ve clung to in pursuit of a deeper self-authorship. I’ve found that in order to know anything true, we have to be willing to have gotten it wrong.
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
Growing up religious, I hear forever over and over. I hear it so much, I don’t know if I ever knew what right now means. What today can be gets lost in hardening stories of alpha, omega, and always: Awash in brimstone and trumpets and the felt impossibility of the human experience.
Growing up religious, it takes me thirty years to discover it was never about what I was or was not allowed to do, or say, or think, in perpetuity. It was, and remains, about who I choose to be amidst the interconnectedness of all things, because I can. Because the power of choice echoes through us, even as we attempt to hide from it.
The older I get, the more I loosen my grip on that which infers the eternal. I find myself squarely against the superiority that comes from believing we can know anything beyond today as often as I yearn to know it still. It was the spirit of this charge that led me to return to my hometown, affectionately known by those of us who grew up there as simply, The Desert.
It was there a desperate and quiet reckoning took place, as I sat smoking beneath the shade of a Desert Velvet Ash tree. Though I understand the habit hurt me, it also seemed the centrifugal reminder to continue breathing. So I remained there, another feature of the landscape, hushed between varying means of smoke and ash.
For a prodigal year, I peered toward the face of the great San Jacinto and up at the shimmering Big Dipper. The constellation seemed affixed between old palms in the night sky for the entirety of my time there. After a moment or two of looking up and out at the whole of my life’s vista, I’d be released from my own interiority, to the grandiosity of that view, all stars and palms.
It was a rarer-still La Niña year. Come January, I’d find impossible flakes of snow on the desert floor and atop the surface of my leather jacket, melting as quickly as the shock of their presence. The creosote would perfume the terrain for months on end, as rain came and then seemed as though it would never stop. I’d thought it was perfect, even as it raged on and on.
The too much-ness of my internal world was, at that point, long-worn—tired on the center stage of my mind’s eye. I’d (once again) lost the nuance between who I was and who I believed myself perceived to be. I’d refused to acknowledge I was still in the fight long after I’d sworn myself a pacifist.
The fight, for all intents and purposes, is the unwillingness to tell the whole truth about ourselves. The unwillingness to believe our fears laid bare is not unique to our own felt ineptitude, but in fact profoundly shared.
Perhaps the foremost cost of felt difference is the loss of who we believe ourselves to be, even at home. The truest self gets worn away, possessed by outside voices and noises, by other places and characters, all while silently meandering about the kitchen.
By Spring, I’d release myself from the straining question(s) of whether or not I was worthy. Worthy of dreams beyond resentment and perception; of freedom from eternity. Worthy of the unbearable beauty of that view, and the sublime essence of The Truth as a process of becoming.
I think of that Desert Velvet Ash tree often still—of the conditional peace afforded to us in time’s fleeting, gaining wisdom. I loosen my grip when I remember what was never mine to hold on to, returned to the presence of truths I can never know until I do.
The older I get, the more I believe it’s what divinity is for. What a God would want for me, for us, for this.