Living in your own truth.

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Dear reader,

This title probably feels a little mysterious to you and that is perfectly fine. Today, I want to talk  about a deep subject dear to my heart: truth. What is “truth”? By essence, it is quite a simple notion; it is what is opposed to “lie”. But how can someone live in his “own truth”? Are there several “truths”? Is putting this word in its plural from actually correct? Grammatically, it is questionable but if we focus only on the meaning of the word, it provides more sense to it. Actually, there are two ways to look at the word “truth”.

• The two definitions of the word “truth”

The first definition is the one we just discussed: the absolute truth is the opposite of the lie. In our everyday life, however, there is no “absolute truth”. All human beings are unique, and they look at the world through their own unique eyes. Thus, they can not see exactly the same thing or, if they do, they can not interpret what they see exactly the same way. Agree?  I bet you do. That is the reason why someone’s notion of truth (“The tree is tall”) can be different than his neighbor’s notion of truth (“The tree is not that tall”). Indeed, the first person being far shorter than the second one, the tree seems a lot taller to her, while the second person thinks it is actually of average height. However, they are both saying the truth. There comes the second definition of “truth”: it is what is real in a particular person’s eyes. None of our wanderers did lie, they simply told two different truths from two different points of view. 

• Follow your truth, not theirs

I hear you already: “well, that’s cool, these two wanderers are not the same height, but what has this explanation to do with our lives?”. I agree, the sentence “living in your own truth” can still seem a little mysterious. However, now that we have established the notion of plural truthS, we can dig a little deeper. Everyone apprehends the world differently, so what is true to you is… true to you only. To live in you own truth, you need to follow what you see, and what your neighbor sees might no suit you perfectly. Living the way somebody else advices you to live is actually counterproductive as this person might be giving the best advice from her very own point of view, but not from yours in any way. The advice-giver’s truth (usually, what we call society’s truth) might be totally opposite to yours. That is when you need to choose you over everything else. I am not advising you to totally abhor common sense, and I am not even asking you to follow my advice as what I am writing might not even suit you, but I am encouraging you to think for yourself and by yourself. You must draw a clear line between what society wants you to do and to become(“you have a great memory, so study law a become a lawyer”) and who you want to become (“I have great memory, but I am also extremely talented at drawing, so I will study art and create comics”). You are the only person able to choose what is best for you. You are the only person who knows you perfectly (or at least the one who knows you the best) and you are the only one who will have to live with the consequences of your choices for the rest of you life. You can still take people’s advice (not everyone’s though) and process them, but in the end, those advice must stay just what they are: advice, not clear directions to follow.

• Learn to listen to your inner voice (and not to your ego)

I just told you to follow yourself, but the question is: “what do I want, what is my truth?” To it, I answer quite simply: try and you will see. It is by trying things that you will discover what you love, what resonates with you, and who you actually are and aim at becoming. Here, I want to draw a distinction. Whether or not you believe in a human “instinct”, learn to differentiate your “instinct” from your ego. Sometimes, you feel like something is “true” to you, but there is still a little something which feels “wrong”. It might be because you are lying to yourself without even acknowledging it. You are still using the knowledge you have been acquiring for years; society is still speaking through your own voice, and that feels wrong. However, that is perfectly normal and do not be too hard on yourself when that happens. If something feels like a lie, sit down and reflect on your thoughts. Soon, you will learn to differentiate intuition (and thus, what is true to you) from ego (what you have been told you whole life should be true… but is not).

TABOULOT Camille