Authenticity

Authenticity is one of the gifts evident in finding one's voice. It has been liberating to be my self and to live my self....with all my very real gifts and shadows. I have grown, as a result, less defensive. After all, admitting to my own faults reduces the temptation to defend an illusion [or perhaps delusion] of personal perfection.
Paradoxically, it has been both liberating and painful to recognize others' lies and delusions. I have endured two spouses who took liberties with the truth, and I often questioned myself rather than them. I questioned whether my ability to trust was compromised. I no longer question my own ability to trust...rather, I know deeply that I can trust my inner voice that wonders: "Is this true?". As I have owned my own shadows, I have, in turn, disowned the temptation to trust others over myself.

Living my life authentically means coming to terms with the lies I told myself within these relationships...lies about my own gifts, about trusting myself, and about speaking truth in the midst. Finding my voice means recognizing both the gifts and the shadows in who I am....affirming the gifts and mediating the shadows. It also means forgiving myself for disowning my sense of self in the past.

Giving Voice to our Stories

"Writing can be a creative and invigorating way to make our lives available to ourselves and to others. We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told - we may discover that the better we tell our stories, the better we will want to live them." -Henri Nouwen

Voice and the Next Generation

My 6 year old Guatemala born son, Gabe, and I have an evening ritual. After we read books and turn out the lights each night, we have a little conversation about our day. We ask each other for "favorite" and "least favorite" moments of the day. Sometimes we play "Two Truths and a Lie", where we say 3 things about our day and the other has to guess which, of the 3, is the lie. Last night, our evening conversation evolved into things we would change, if we could, about the world. Gabe said he would make "ticks extinct" and he would invent a special potion to rid the world of "mosquitoes". I'm not certain where his bug disdain came from, but it was a distinct theme. During my turn, I suggested that I would eliminate prejudice, which I defined in what I thought was good kid language as "when people tend to not like those look differently from them". I thought it was a moment to prepare him for both the reality of prejudice against those with darker skin tone as well as the opportunity we have to make our world a better place. Gabe's immediate response surprised me as he exclaimed, "I thought John Luther King took care of that". It took me a moment to recover from the cuteness factor and to respond, well "Martin Luther King, Jr. did a lot of work to change laws and helped us make a lot of progress"...but there is still work to do in people's hearts.

How does a 6 year old already believe that race relations were fixed 40 years before he was born? How will his perspective be impacted when he comes upon the realities of modern day race relations? Specifically, that he will, at some point in time, be treated in a particular way due to his ethnicity? It strikes me that Gabe's response is reminiscent of a lot of adults. Didn't we fix all that race stuff in the 1960's? I don't think so. But how do we honor both progress and the need for change? And do so in a way that both honors our predecessors who have instilled progress and also galvanize future generations to overcome cynicism and seek change?