I have no idea why I feel the need to purge my truth. Okay that is not true, I know why. Because it feels better afterwards. I feel a weight lifted. I feel lighter inside. I feel brave and smart and liberated and even cool. I feel like I am doing something I would have never done most of my adult life. Tell my truth. Tell my truth knowing some will sit in judgment of me. But I tell it anyway. I tell it because by telling it, it makes me feel better. I even tell myself, "You get this out and you will live longer."

​Tomorrow as many as 35 women and a few men are going to tell their truth. Yep. They will share their truth in our new book, "This is my story, but it is not my life." I hope they will feel better too. My guess is they will. They absolutely will.

​I could not think of what to share this time around. This is my 3rd published truth story. And it was not for a lack of having nothing to say. It was the choosing of what hidden part was ready to reveal itself. The hardest part of truth talking is when everyone around you has a certain perception of you and your telling will shatter that paradigm. I have learned that that shattering comes with the truth telling part.

​Would I tell people that how I have deep fears? Fears of becoming my alcoholic mother, a deep fear of being alone if my only remaining sibling were to die first. Would I share my guilt of being the first one in my immediate family to break out of poverty and make it over to what they call "the made it" side? Would I tell of how I move so fast because if I stop too long I will think too much? And sometimes thinking brings sadness.

​Do I just share another uncomfortable piece of me and whatever that new revealed piece is that I share, I will own it? I will embrace it as an essential part of who I am and share how God is using even that piece to craft his work in me. Do I tell the world that I have learned to love even the hidden parts of me? And that even though some parts have not been revealed to others, I know what they are and embrace how they came to be a part of me.

​The truth is this. I am complicated. We are complicated. The difference between my new self and my old self is my insatiable desire to use everything inside me to discover the best parts of me. And through that discovery I desire to love all of me in return. And that is my truth. It really doesn't matter what anyone thinks. It matters that those hidden parts had their chance with light. And that I might live longer.

What I am about to share is about me. If you think anything beyond that you will be missing me. You will be assuming much more than intended.

Recently I took a break from drinking. I did not make a big promise to myself or a proclamation or even an apology of any sort. I simply stopped doing something I had become used to doing for a very long time. I stopped letting alcohol do my feeling. I decided to do my own feeling for awhile.

I grew up watching what alcohol does to one’s soul. I saw firsthand how it can become friend and foe in the same evening. How it can make you laugh and cry then sleep. Sometimes I saw how it can make you want to fight. I saw how it can make you change your mind about things, make you forget things too. Watching this I vowed “that” would never be me. I will do my own thinking, my own forgetting, my own fighting, my own laughing, my own sleeping. I did not need that kind of help.

Then I turned 50. Then I forgot what I had told myself way back then. And because I did not exactly look like “that”, behave like that, sound like that, forget like that, then I had not become “that”. So I told myself. That is until I realized this one thing. That “that” looks differently on everyone. I had become a different version of that. But “that” I had become or was well on my way to becoming. I had become my version of “that”. That one thing I promised myself I would not do. I had begun to allow alcohol to do my feeling.

The most difficult part was breaking a habit that though had not become an addiction has become a familiar habit. A familiar feeling. I put my habit into pretty glasses poured from bottles with pretty labels hung with nice necklaces displayed on beautiful shelves in pretty rooms filled with charming people on days that did not matter in that week. What mattered was my habit was on standby to shape my feelings no matter what was going on in that room on that day or any other day.

I told myself you eat well, you exercise well, you live well. I could not deny, I drink well too. And that habit was beginning to take over my feelings.

So, I broke up with drinking. We will meet again. Maybe a month from now, a year or some time after that. We will meet and I will be glad we did.

But this next time my feelings get to lead our next dance together.

​#truthisthebeginning