I see now how it was curated. And how exhausting it’s been. How splitting off from the truth meant I couldn’t take care of myself. It meant I couldn’t even know myself. To some extent, we aren’t lying as much as we don’t know who we are or how we feel. It’s not like we start from connection to ourselves and then try to override that. We start from the place of What do I need to do, who do I need to be, to be relationally safe? I lied because I needed to maintain someone’s perception of me. And because we don’t really know another’s perception, it was often a guessing game.
