tell what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about
So the little self-published book I wrote a foreword for (The Art of Being Unmistakable by Srinivas Raos) has grown up to be a bestseller.
Here’s what happened. Glenn Beck – yes, Glenn Beck – fell in wild and irrevocable love with the book, with the message, and had the author – “a surfer from Berkeley” — flown to Texas to appear on his show.
(I know what you might be mumbling to yourself. Glenn the hell Beck? But it goes to show that some things truly do reach beyond the political divide. Or abyss, as the case may be.)
At one point, Glenn and Srini discuss the power of telling your truth. The full, unedited, scary truth. Which reminds me of this quote by Natalie Goldberg:
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
Srini likes to say he wrote the book “by committing career suicide one Facebook status update at a time”. (The rough draft of the book first appeared as a series of lengthy Facebook updates.) Glenn mentioned that the day he started telling his truth on air was the day he thought his career was over: “instead, it was really just beginning.”
If you want to create something great, you have to put yourself out there to bleed a little. click to tweet
When you look at the things we fear the most, they include exposure, ridicule, and social exile (or worse). We learn that to risk these things is to be vulnerable, and to be vulnerable is to be weak — in a culture where only the strong survive.
We hide behind social masks and lists of best practices: taking our cues from what has already worked for the people who have gone before us, and shaping ourselves accordingly.
As human beings, though, we seem to have an obsessive hunger for what is authentic, for what is real. In a society as mediated as ours has become, maybe we can’t always describe what we mean by ‘authentic’ – which allows the word to become as overused and emptied of meaning as many accuse it of being. We know it when we see it. Or rather, we know it when we feel it…because it, whatever ‘it’ is, slips past our intellectual defenses and goes straight to the heart of who we are.
To the primal, emotional, nonverbal part of us.
It’s the place where we don’t think so much as pulse with the fierce recognition that your experience is also my experience: a part of myself kept safely hidden and unsaid. It’s like you got into my soul and said what I was thinking, or what I felt but didn’t know to say, or how to say, or couldn’t risk saying.
There comes a sense of relief and wonder: sometimes of shame lifting away, and often of illumination: I am not alone. I thought it was just me, but I’m part of something bigger. There are others of my kind.
To make something truly your own means to infuse it with your deep sensibility, to filter it through your unique worldview, to cast it in your signature voice. When you do this, you step out from behind the mask. You show your inner life.
You make yourself vulnerable.
Instead of saying what’s already been said, you explore a new aspect by saying what and how it is true for you. You update it, or reinvent it, or put a new spin on it, or veer off into new territory altogether.
Because it’s truly yours, it’s fresh and new.
Because it’s true, we pulse with it, resonate with you, and reward you with our time, our money, our attention, our love – and sometimes our hatred.
Truth gets under the skin. It shows up the places where we are the same — but also where we believe ourselves to be wildly different.
The courage to tell the truth includes the courage to be controversial. click to tweet
Truth – and truthtelling — are not for the faint-hearted.
