December always makes me more honest than I intended to be. There is something about the close of a year — the forced accounting of it, the looking back at the twelve-month experiment, the anticipation of something presumably better ahead — that strips away my usual considerable talent for minding my own business. By December I have generally run out of patience for the comfortable version of things and am operating entirely in a mode, direct, warm, occasionally a lot, and extremely difficult to redirect once I've decided something is true.
I have a long history of saying exactly what I think and then being mildly surprised by the consequences. My close friends are entirely unsurprised. They have had years to adjust their expectations accordingly.
December 2022 was a year-end that arrived with some weight. A season of great pain. A storm that would not settle. There were conversations I'd been having with myself that needed to happen with other people. There were things I knew that I'd been pretending not to know, which is an exhausting hobby and one I do not recommend. The year had asked a great deal of me. I had given a great deal. And somewhere in that December — probably around a second cup of coffee on a morning too quiet to pretend — I sat down and decided to write about what it actually costs to be someone who tells the truth even when the truth is inconvenient. Especially then.
The holidays in 2022 was spent in Santa Fe, NM with my sister. It was a reinteroduction after this painful season. I was quiet and contained. I was thoughtful about where I put my energy that year. Some relationships in my life were being tested. Some of them were passing. Some were not. I realized I was on the cuspt of saying goodbye to a bond with my closets freind, a family member of of 23 years. She was my rock. The univierse gift of another sister. By her shere presnce, she would fill my cup when it was empty, to the point it runneth over. My heart ached knowing this was nother season coming to clousre.
In the Realm of Truth
In the realm of truth, under moon's gentle sway, I stand at the edge where night whispers today. Your presence, a danger, in shadows it brews, For I am too honest, and secrets I lose.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →You find out a great deal about people in December, when the year is tired and the performances are harder to maintain. The people who stay present when there's nothing to gain from it — they're the ones worth keeping. I kept the right ones. But I realized I was in aduit of certain realtionships in my life. Those who disapear or no longer offer a safe harbor, a shelter in the storm, are at risk of being washing away.
What I know about truth: it does not set you free immediately. It sets you free eventually. The in-between is complicated and sometimes costs you sleep and occasionally costs you relationships that were not what they appeared to be. But I would rather carry the weight of something real than the lightness of something false. That math has not changed for me in forty-something years of testing it.
There were also good laughs that December. The aching kind — the ones where you're helpless and tear-faced and whoever's with you is equally helpless and you've both completely lost the thread of what you were even laughing about. There were long dinners. Music. Chocolate, which I will always consider a legitimate form of grace. There were moments I am deeply grateful I didn't miss by being too busy to show up for them.
Choose truth not because it's comfortable — it never is, and if someone is selling you a comfortable truth, what they're actually selling is a well-decorated approximation of it. Choose truth because the alternative is a version of yourself you don't recognize, and recognition — of yourself, of the people you love, of the actual moment you're actually in — is worth everything it costs.