Find Your Uncomfortable Truth
& Release Infinite Potential
We’re paradoxical creatures. Pride comes before a fall. Our pleasures create our suffering. Our character strengths are also our character weaknesses.
To unlock potential, re-examine who you think you are and what you think you do best. In that claim you may find a kind of pride that comes from fear, that seeks to set up boundaries and claim certain ground for the ego: I am kind, I am intelligent, I am honest, I am compassionate, I am musical — whatever the claim, and as true as it may be, within it is usually a fearful misrepresentation which, like a rotting apple in a barrel of good ones, spreads its influence.
So how do your ideas about yourself limit you?
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain
An Uncomfortable Truth
I want to tell you about Tony and the uncomfortable truth that led to his early death.
When Tony was younger, his whole brand was that he didn’t lie. He would have said that people’s willingness to lie to one another is the beginning of corruption in human relationships that leads to inequality and exploitation— that no untruth is justified and you must speak the truth always.
He wrote and tried in his writing to find the ‘truth’ of his life. This was his big character virtue, his big character flaw — being honest — and it led to tragic results. For many years, I watched on as he blundered after ‘the truth’, hurting people on the way and finally, when he found the truth, it was too much for him to bear and he ended his life.
He was lonely
He was dancing in a club and a pretty girl started dancing with him.
She: ‘Do you like R’n’B music?’
He: ‘No.’
I had to explain to him that that he hasn’t just truthfully told he he didn’t like that kind of music but he’d basically said he didn’t like her.
So he stayed lonely.
He couldn’t make friends with the right people
He arrived late to a Marxism seminar at University and our lecturer (a pretty well know UK Marxist professor/writer) was angry and told him arrive on time or not come at all.
‘I’ve paid for the course,’ Tony said in his dry way, ‘so as the consumer am I not entitled to take as much of it as I want?’
The Professor was enraged at being called a capitalist salesman and from that point on the idea of Tony doing Post-doc Marxism study was off the cards.
He found love, but…
He kept a diary in which he wrote all his true thoughts. and by true, he had this idea that you had to tell things that polite conversation wouldn’t allow — about how he had feelings for other women, how thoughts of sex were often in his mind — of course, honesty said he had to show his wife before their wedding (He’d also heard that Tolstoy did this)
There was no wedding. She left.
He was devastated
And tried to fall back on his friends — including me. We felt bad for him and we wanted to help him, but his mindset was so dark at that time. He also had this damned habit of watching us microscopically, looking for our lies and our misrepresentations and pointing them out.
We set up an intervention to try and get him onto another track because at this point he was unemployed, sleeping on my sofa and no longer trying to make a life for himself.
Us — his old friends, meeting up behind his back — set off his Lie Detector and he became convinced that we were uniting against him, using his weakness as an excuse to strengthen our friendships with each other, taking what was his — ‘like scavengers, picking me over now I’m wounded’ he put it.
He Found the Uncomfortable Truth in the End
He was always looking for the uncomfortable truth around him — arriving to everyplace and every opportunity with critical eyes and his lie detector buzzing and bleeping.
This was the uncomfortable truth he found in the end —
It was a truth not about the things he judged but about himself.
He was a person who looked for uncomfortable truths — who red his ego and his claims to be smart and deep out of bringing pain to other people — that he was a dangerous person to be around, one who no one wanted to spend anytime with.
He didn’t find out the truth about the universe — for the enlightenment of mankind — as he might have said all those years ago — he just found out the truth about himself, and it broke him.
He recognized finally that the only real truth was that he was not a nice guy. that where he could have been being kind and bringing happiness he constantly sought to bring pain and guilt.
So he ended his life.
Metaphorically
‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’
Killing yourself is a great place to start at getting reborn and releasing potential which years of pride, arrogance and misconceptions might have locked away in a festering mound of egotism.
I said goodbye to Tony a while ago, though I still see him in the mirror occasionally and hear his thoughts break out of my lips now and then.
I figured out that my big ‘strength’ of character — honesty — was little more than fear. Of moving into unknown places, of creating new relationships —just a rude bouncer outside the walls of my comfort zone. I was cutting things dead because I feared that maybe I couldn’t pull off the actual thing — the career, the marriage, the relationships.
Re-write your Virtue
I had to suffer a few setbacks to see the script in my head that was leading me to create problems for myself. Then I had to rewrite it.
Scripts that start with ‘I am..’ are generally limiting and false — they’re all about finding that deep truth about yourself that maybe isn’t there, or that you maybe don’t want to find anyway — I’ve found that ‘I can…’ is a better formula.
You can do anything you want to — so long as you don’t have big ‘I am..’ ideas blocking and protecting your fears — you can grow in whichever ways you think best if you discover you uncomfortable truth and rewrite it.
