I am afraid to live my truth

[Bob Seeker]

I work closely with my boss, basically 1 on 1.

 

He likes me so he always tells me what he’s thinking. He is an old fashioned conservative, son of Polish immigrants.

 

He passionately tells me about how liberalism is destroying the world, about how people need to go to church. He says biased things about other people. I don’t agree with most of what he tells me.

 

He thinks I am a good Catholic because my family is Catholic. He says he prays for me and my family.

 

I am afraid to speak my truth and tell him I disagree. I am afraid to tell him I don’t go to church and am not interested in Catholic dogma.

 

I am afraid of seeing the disappointment on his face. I am afraid of bursting his bubble. I am afraid of having to work closely with him believing that he is frowning upon my decision about who I am. 

 

I am worried that he might regret having me work there. I am worried there will be tension in the room that I can’t handle. I am scared he will know I was pretending about who I was and what I believed.

 

I am concerned about my future. What will everyone else think if I live my truth. I imagine them frowning on me, hating me, saying mean things, scolding me, muttering to themselves about I am weird, maybe even physically harming me.

 

I am afraid to dance and sing and express joy and happiness openly where other people can hear or see me.

 

I am concerned people will abandon me. That my physical needs will not be met. That I won’t be able to have a good job and will upset other people so much that they kick me out of society or worse.

 

I am worried I will hurt people’s feelings and cause them to be embarrassed and to doubt themselves and feel like lost little children. 

 

These are the reasons it took me many years to tell my dad I am not Catholic. These are the reasons I feel like I’m hiding myself around others. 

 

I sense the freedom in being completely myself, living my truth fully, and speaking openly and confidently about what I really believe is and is not true, yet I am so hesitant to do anything about it.

 

Edited May 30 by Bob Seeker

[Phil]

The difference between my truth and the truth is there’s no one here / there. ‘My’ is a little bitty veil. 

 

Stick with direct experience. Thoughts about being a thinker and therein there being other thinkers and all the concerns which arise therein are, thoughts, and are not, thinkers. Same for doer / doers. 

 

For these thoughts, for the alignment of these thoughts with truth, there is emotion. 

Note the thoughts (about the thinkers etc), and note the emotion felt as guidance for the thoughts. 

 

‘I am worried’ or ‘I am worrying’ for example, is on behalf of a separate self which isn’t. Doesn’t exist. Worry on the other hand, is guidance for the thoughts, inherently in how emotions feel. 

 

These are literal, not philosophical, existential or metaphysical. Those would be thoughts, concepts, veiling.

There is no physical. There is no separation.