“A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.”
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching
When you first begin to talk, most chances are you'll be lying. Learning to talk and learning to talk the truth aren't taught at the same lesson. Time for truth is later, once you can actually talk, once you have a language to fit truth within. Ignorance has a place, and you are not too defeated if you frequently, along the way, reminded yourself and your audience that you are not claiming to be absolutely right, just right for yourself, for now, for a very specific moment. Life moves on. For all of us. Truth reshapes itself. We are all students in that lesson. The first step, or at least one of the first, is to learn to talk - in whatever voice you have. You will regret your nudity later; the desperate hope that anyone could just be you for a moment, to truly understand one sentence of yours; the thought that words can make any real difference in a heart that is not already looking for your proposal anyhow. (So you are basically “just” the one who puts it in words and suffers the artillery of the “public”). Later on you might hate yourself even more, when you see the limits of your old conviction, of what you thought to be truth then. Yourself of the present would have behaved totally different. But there's no way out. You'll continue saying your truth, because that's the only way to refine it, to refine yourself; the only way to actually change to be the person you want to be. You have to give weight to your own word, you've decided long ago not to be like a leaf drifting on an evening's breeze, at least not the breeze of societies limitations, of deep inherited fear of being cast out of the tribe and left alone to die. This explains very well the fear of not fitting, as if there is anyone who actually always fits, as if your dream of what you should be fitting in has real existence outside your mental reality. You'll keep talking, and you'll see a definite progress that will keep you renewing this cycle from communication to reflection to communication. In order to be able to sit and reflect back in conviction that the best was done, that fear was not the ruler this time round, that again I managed to fuck up so hard in order to understand again that I'm not in a contest, and that my “results” can not be measured by anyone besides myself - who has chosen non judgment as a way of life anyhow.
When you first begin to talk, most chances are you'll be lying. When you realize you did that, it sucks, it really is, but remember, this was your choice, and it still is. A little pain isn't what's going to throw you off, right?
