🧵 Thursday Thread: We Lie Loudest When We Lie To Ourselves
Carl Sagan said where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves. Is this true for you? When have you caught yourself lying to yourself & how did you get closer to the truth?
Upcoming WITD Offerings (manage/upgrade here to join, all Zoom links for live events emailed day of)
📝 Wednesday, July 31 Last chance for early-bird discount for Writing in the Dark: THE SCHOOL, our new 9-month slow-writing program for people serious about advancing their craft and joyful about "doing language better.” ALL LEVELS, no application. Details and sign-up here.
📝 Wednesday, August 7 we start our next seasonal intensive for paid members, Strange Containers: Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities, a fun, four-week immersion in short, weird work to break you into some exciting new material before summer ends. Write with us!!
In yesterday’s post about Radical Self-Honesty: A Simple Tool, I wrote about how I lied to myself—in a subtle way that had profound, life-limiting, dream-killing consequences—for years and years and years.
I said:
For a long time, I told myself I wanted to write a book, but did very little toward the actual work of writing a book. It took the death of a student close to my own age—this was about 13 years ago, so I was about 42 then—to wake me up and make me see that what I said I wanted and told myself I wanted was not aligned with my actions. So, either I did not want what I claimed to want enough to take actions to achieve it, or something else was stopping me.
I won’t tell the whole story here about how I dismantled this subtle but profoundly limiting self-deception in order to finally finish and publish my book and transform my creative practice and, as a result, my whole life, because for one, I told the short version in yesterday’s post.
For two, it’s kind of boring story in the sense that once I acknowledged I wasn’t being honest with myself—my actions weren’t matching the story I was telling—the transformation in my life took place gradually, through each small, honest decision and action that I made, one after the next after the next after the next.
I think there are times when transformation is more dramatic (my divorce, for example, was like that).
No matter the pace—whether a slow unfolding or an explosive reinvention—the way we transform ourselves when we “catch ourselves in a lie” is almost always profound when viewed later, from a distance.
I would love so much to hear your stories of self-discovery and transformation in the aftermath of self-deception.
In other words, have you ever realized you were deceiving yourself, however subtly, and pivoted as a result?
Tell us about it if you’re willing.
Love,
Jeannine
PS Threads/comments are for paid members; you can upgrade/manage your membership here any time. Thank you so much for reading Writing in the Dark!