The best advice from a friend in a long time

I need work. I know this. But I'm always (still) surprised when someone says something to me that I may have already heard and it clicks. I'm sure I've written about this before. And I'm sure most of you know what I mean when I say this. Today, I got an email from a friend who was responding to some things I was unloading (and responding to that and what he was saying) and he wrote this...something I'm sure I'll want to keep and pin up and post up somewhere:

"If you are lying to people then you aren't really letting them love you."

Maybe this hit me hard because I feel like most of the past few years I've lived keeping things from people and so, justify this as not lying. But over Christmas break I was made aware, again and again, that this is still lying and that in a way, it's just as bad if not worse as any other kind of "straight forward" kind of lying. I hate hearing this. It's so much easier to hide things...especially from people I love. After all, am I that confident that they will love the whole me if I were to reveal this to them? I'm not sure. I know I know, the answer is supposed to be "of course they will," and I've heard all that before. But whatever the reason, I can't get this through my head and into my heart and so, it's taking me time and time and more time to sort through my past, present and what can now be called my future. So bear with me please. I'll never forget (and yes, I've mentioned it here before) what one friend of mine said to me in an e-mail last spring that nearly drove me to the floor in tears: "Neville, it's okay to be the weak one. It's okay not to be in control. You don't always have to have it all together."

Maybe I cried after reading that because I knew it was true. Maybe I cried after reading that becaue I knew how weak I really was and that maybe this is what I was trying to hide. I don't know why exactly this hit me but it did. I wish sometimes I didn't have this blog to communicate through. And I wish that I could sit down every one of my close friends and just go to town and unload on them. It's funny how our lives don't really function around these types of things (they function around jobs, schedules, etc.) but these are the things that give our lives meaning and so, I wonder how much more of an emphasis we should be placing on things of such nature.

Get back to me on that one. Good night.