So many times I find that I must pour my heart out and say the things that I feel I just can’t not say. A majority of the time it’s when I have dosed myself with “truth serum”. What is my “truth serum”? Well, it’s alcohol, usually. I don’t seem to be able to not say some filtered version of what’s on my mind in general but add alcohol and that filter is completely torn asunder. I try to remain tactful and kind, regularly, or at least mask harsh comments with humor when I’m sober. When I drink I feel less inclined to try. I’m pretty sure that’s not unusual for the average person. The trouble is I am very opinionated about almost everything. What most people don’t know about me is that I rarely feel my opinions are set in stone. There are exceptions where an idea is cemented as absolute truth based on a bevy of experience or scientific proof or a combination of proven sources. I am very in touch with my feelings and I play scenarios through my mind quite frequently in hopes to find optimal conversation results. I don’t do it all the time but I do it.
My ex-boyfriend often asked many questions on how I felt about things that I didn’t think I should have feeling about. That always threw me off and would send my poor mind into dead silence. I constantly answered his questions with “I don’t knows” and “maybes”. I know that drove him crazy. It drove me crazy. I think that after careful introspection I’ll just blame it on him and say that I felt constant criticism when I did try to form replies on the fly. So, clearly, it wasn’t my fault (I’m being a little facetious). In addition to the criticism, I distinctly remember a time when I would answer his numerous questions with the first thing that would pop into my mind. Being the person that I am I would say how I felt with all the flooding emotion in my soul. On one such occasion when I poured my soul out in wordy exhalation he turned and said, “I don’t need all that mushy stuff. How does it make you feel? Tell me without all the mushy talk.” That just really hurt me. In that moment the part of me that wanted to please him and be perfect for him blamed my cursed brain for being flowery and I corrected what I said to make it plain. As soon as the stripped version of what I had said escaped my lips I realized what I said I felt without the frills no longer had the true meaning left in it. The actual emotion was completely gone from the statement. It felt pedestrian and, quite plainly stated, empty. This is what I felt with him. I felt frustrated at the lack of being able to express myself and I felt hopelessly empty. I know that I’m not the only person to ever feel that way and I know that it’s not the last time or only time period in life that I will feel that way. I’m convinced that he actually feels that way most of the time as well. A frustrated person unable to communicate actual emotion as it presents itself. The main difference between his frustration and mine is that I know what I feel. I feel everything to the inner core of my very being. I understand it and embrace it in order to comprehend it. I believe that he, on the other hand, has very little connection to his emotion center. He is disconnected from it in such away that he has no idea what his emotions mean. I think that he has convinced himself that this is a strength but in reality his lack of understanding his own feelings has not made him less emotional and more logical but rather, it has made him a debilitated ball of pure emotion. He works on gut reactions based not on logic, but on basic, literal, emotional assumptions.
My second ex-husband was always very soothed by my pure emotional reactions. That’s how it seemed. That’s probably why I’d say that he and I were very well paired. We accepted each other in all the glories of our emotional outpourings. We existed side by side in parallel happiness, sadness, turmoil, joy, self loathing, and narcissism. We complemented each other in many ways. On the whole we were the perfect team because our moods supported each other or complemented one another. Our interests were similar as well as our tastes. We both aimed to please one another and often did. The truth in our relationship was that we held back. More than he and I would probably admit we kept parts of our raw emotion at bay so we wouldn’t scare each other. While I feel like I was most open with him than with any other human I have known I feel like he didn’t communicate as freely with me. I think he didn’t because men aren’t supposed to let their guard all the way down. I think that’s what he felt. I don’t think men should be any more stoic than women. I will say that the stoicism is admirable but there should be at least one person you can drop the wall with. If that person isn’t your wife/partner/companion then maybe you shouldn’t be married to them. For me, I’ll say that with second ex-husband I didn’t always feel I should let go the emotion because I learned that being loudly “mushy” was not acceptable. I could have let go but I didn’t. I also didn’t think it right for me to ask of him what I thought I was supposed to suppress. In fact, we rarely insisted that either of us alter our ways to accommodate each other. I think that we were both very adept at reading situations between us and just going with the flow to keep each other happy. Hey, it worked for a decent amount of time. Six years with someone is far from nothing in this era. Why didn’t it work then? At some point it appears that both of us became too accommodating. We became roommates. We loved each other detrimentally. Instead of voicing all the flowery agony in all it’s glory we suppressed in hopes that out intuition would save our relationship from a fatal blow. All the beauty left us and he went to find it somewhere else. I hope that if he finds another woman like me in this world that he will risk her anger before he walks away from her like he did me. Honesty is far better a route than abandonment to save yourself some hard work or a woman’s potential feelings/anger. I could have expected more. I should have asked for what I wanted. I should have told him there were things I could never be ok with before we were married. I shouldn’t have married him thinking that love could save us from feeling pain. If only we could have poured out every ounce of our hearts to one another. I think we would have made it.
Why isn’t my first ex-husband mentioned? It’s not worth mentioning. It was too brief. I feel that the whole thing was pure pretense. I felt like I loved him. I felt like it would be forever. I felt connected to him but in the end the reality of the relationship was so humiliating that I felt too ashamed to admit that I ever loved that broken, destructive person.
Where are the other ex-boyfriends? Well, as non progressive as I feel that this sounds, I’m a serial monogamist. If you know me then you probably know that I want to experience life to its very limits. Monogamy can be perceived as having limits, so, I often wish that I could be poly-amorous. That’s why I feel being a serial monogamist sounds non progressive. I had one other ex-boyfriend that could be mentioned but I seriously think that the truth of that relationship was that it was devoid of any dimension. The honesty, which is the goal here, is that I never felt that we were paired well. He was a nice guy. He was kind enough to me. He was actually very open with me. I was not open with him. I now feel a sense of cruelty on my part in retrospect. I never intended to be ingenuous to him but I don’t think I was actually in love with him. In fact, I am revealing a very horrible version of myself by saying that I probably treated him like a project. Ugh, I now remember that he was a really nice guy that even asked me to marry him and I shot him down. I am so glad that I didn’t marry him. We would have been so very indescribably unhappy together. There was no pouring out of my heart to him that I remember. I’d apologize to him now if I had any knowledge of his whereabouts. He got the very emptiest version of me I know of. Such selfishness on my part. I’m ashamed about this admission.
I’d venture to say that there have been many meaningful, mentionable other times that I have poured my heart out to others. plenty of times where I haven’t needed a truth serum to get me through the words of emotion. I often have to incorporate music to accompany these pourings. Facebook has seen many of them although they probably seemed to just be basic musings. I have blurted the pouring out of my heart to my sister and brother, the siblings I grew up with. I have often bled my heart out to my mother. I have never done that with my father. I have a couple of close friends that I have done this with. One of them never understands what impact the words should have, the other often pours her heart out.
Why do I go through this entire entry just rambling on about how I once gave or I might have given insight into my thoughts and emotion? Because Christmas day, or rather night, I poured my heart out in a text. It’s a limited form of communication and may not constitute a full heart confession. Nonetheless, I tried to express something that I felt was a pouring out of my heart’s deepest emotion. What I put out there wasn’t fully dismissed by the recipient but I’m not sure that the impact was fully realized. It makes me kind of sad but also happy that I’m learning to let what I feel be said again. There was some truth serum involved. Now if I can learn to let my heart be known unabashedly no matter my state I’ll count myself a changed woman. One that has improved. Despite all the ramblings that have preceded this statement I now want to say we should open our hearts for all the see. We should pour out our intents, desires, and emotion to every audience as long as it is genuine and free of intended malice. I want to show myself and be understood just the way I am. I’m not saying that I should never have to explain what my emotion means but I should be heard. We should all be heard but we should all take the first step and open ourselves to others we trust. If we have no one to trust we must find someone to instill our trust in. If we feel we love someone or want to love someone we should find a way to pour out our hearts to them. I want to take the risks, I want to show it all and I won’t be ashamed to hear your confessions too.
The Lost Art of Honesty 