Not Everything Needs A Silver Lining

It’s okay to tell your truth even if your truth is messy and bitter and frustrated and angry and mean and petty and negative. The truth is not always tied up neatly with a bow. There’s not always a silver lining. There’s not always some lesson learned to your pain. Sometimes things are just not okay for no reason. Sometimes it feels senseless and unfair and uncharacteristically chaotic. Sometimes there is no gratitude, no five-point list of what you’re thankful for, because sometimes life sweeps in like a wildfire and starts burning down what you’ve built.

It’s okay if you need to state the messiest of your truth and stand right in the muck of it. It’s okay if you let your nasty truth hang in the air without an apology, without a condition, without searching for a reason or a lesson or a way out of the nasty. You can state how you’re feeling internally about your own life without feeling the need to say, “It’s fine. I’m fine.” Shit doesn’t need to be fine. It’s okay if your truth isn’t even in the same realm as your highest good or best self. It’s okay if there’s no conclusion, no period, no last paragraph that sums it all up and completes the story.

Your life is not a novel. You are not living in chapters. You are not supposed to have a reason for everything. Sometimes life is just life. The entirety of your feeling does not need to be punctuated by an uplifting quote. You don’t need to uplift anyone at the sacrifice of how you truly feel.

Because, sometimes feeling like shit also feels like it needs an apology. Sometimes it feels like your truth isn’t the nice, kind, compassionate light that people have expected from you. Sometimes it feels like you’ve been pigeonholed within your own life and you are only allowed to be One Thing. Whatever is boiling beneath the surface of Who Other People Think You Are is the real shit. That’s the tonic of who you are. That’s the boiling underbelly of what makes you you. And yet, you hide it away and conceal it. You make it all pretty and you tell the truth, but only the watered-down version of the truth that is deemed acceptable and worthy. When that truth is nasty and petty and bitter and frustrated, you wrap it all up and silver lining the shit out of it.

And, you are doing this for other people. You are not doing this for you. You are doing this so that it softens the blow of your truth. That silver lining? That small apology? That positive reinforcement? That tidy little paragraph at the end? That’s for them, hon, not you.

It’s just that, when you expose that kind of raw emotion and you don’t have an answer, you leave it all out on the table with the audacity to not clean it up and make it pretty, it exposes other people to what they’re not saying, what they’re not exposing and laying on the table and not cleaning up for other people’s benefit.

It’s called YOUR truth for a reason. It’s yours. You get to own that. You get to own the messiness of it. It’s not about the other person. It’s not about anyone. It’s about you.

So, no, you don’t need to make your truth pretty. You don’t need to say things are okay when they’re not. You don’t need to figure it all out and tie it all up and then—and only then—tell your truth. No, you can be annoyed and petty and frustrated and irrational and weird and unacceptable and inappropriate and you don’t need to apologize for any of that. You don’t have to be pretty when you’re being honest.

You don’t have to be pretty when you’re being honest.

So, no, you don’t need a silver lining. Your truth doesn’t need to come with a warning or a condition or an apology. You can be angry and bitter and unhappy and frustrated and all the ugly that comes from darkness. You can be all those things because—in allowing these—you soon allow their opposite. The tides always turn. If there’s something that is a constant in life it’s that the tides always turn. The sun always rises.

But, until then? No, your truth does not have to be pretty. Not at fucking all.