It seems to me, a good blog demands honesty. This immediately makes me a bad blogger. I lie about a lot of things, my age being the most common untruth.

This year especially, when I’ve stepped out of hometown comfort, where it really does feel like everyone knows my name, I’ve struggled with ideas of what is true and how that applies to my life.

There’s a mythology in America that you can pack up your bags, declare bankruptcy, quit your job and MOVE WEST! START OVER! But I’ve become increasingly struck by the fact that you can’t escape your own story.

I interviewed a playwright named Jon Tuttle this week, who just finished a play about middle-aged friends in 1970. “You wake up one day and find that you’re middle-aged and the surprise is that for the past 25 years, you’ve been making choices and decisions you didn’t know you were making,” Tuttle said in one of the more enlightening interviews I’ve had.  ”And you can’t help but think that life could’ve been different. But you’ll never know.”

That’s just it though. There is no starting over. And no matter how often I’ve convinced myself otherwise – lies don’t make something real. In fact, they make everything more unreal.

Someone reminded me this year that the smarter you are, the more prone you are to lie, because you know you can manipulate people and get away with it. But I’m beginning to think that the smarter you are, the more confident in who you are, the more you appreciate the truth. In some ways what is true about you is the only thing in your life that is real.

I very much recognize how lucky I am to be as young as I am. New adventures begin every day. Everything ahead of me. And no reason not to be honest with myself.

And if you’re wondering what I’ve spent the month of April doing. It’s the same thing I always do in April. Four years in a row now. Read The Wasteland several times a week. If I could be friends with anyone at any time, it would be T.S. Eliot.

27 Apr This entry was published on April 27, 2012 at 10:33 am and is filed under Personal, Poetry. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.