Be Honest with me Please!

This is my constant plea, I just want people to be honest with me.  Tell me the unvarnished truth.  If it hurts my feelings for a minute so what, I am grown and I will get over it.  You don't know how many times I have told people that come into my life, this very same thing.  There is never a good reason to lie to anyone.  Even more so if you are trying to have a relationship with that person.   How many times have you caught someone you are dating in a lie?  Isn't it sad!

I want people to know that the one thing that will break my trust with you faster than anything else is for me to catch you in a lie.  I am on this living truthfully kick, it is hard, but you know what I think my friends and associates appreciate me more because I say exactly what is on my mind and I no longer sugar coat the truth.  I blurt it out without a filter.  See, I have many doctors that keep telling me that I am nearing the end of the road.  But you and I both know that God just might have some other plans for me.

Life has become too short and fragile for me to hold things back.  Instead of hiding and holding my feelings in like I used to I express them immediately, I get it out there and it makes me feel better.  I am learning that there is a time and place for everything including tact.  I have to learn that sometimes it is important to hold ones tongue.  However, it is never appropriate to lie to someone's face.  Honestly I think they will respect you more and the trust you are building with them will become stronger.

I had a lover once that used to introduce me to others as the lover he always wanted the person he never had to lie too.  I like that, because honestly if it wasn't for his temper and us fighting all the time, we might still be together today.  Amazingly we are very close friends and I have even told him that I honestly don't think our story is finished yet.  I certainly hope not.

My life has changed I think for the better over the last year.  I got away from the drug scene that was so prevalent in my life.  I got extremely ill, had an aneurysm and still survived and went into a nursing home for 6 months and came out a new person.  I am sad that I have lost some friends along the way, several have died and others have moved on and left me behind.  But to be honest with you, maybe it was for the best that I was left to my own devices and all alone.  The temptations of the past have gone with the people that I surrounded myself with. Now that they have moved on those temptations are gone.

Since the temptations are gone, so is the need to tell lies and hide the truth about myself and my life to everyone around me. You don't know how many times I had to sneak around and hide my true intentions from my parents, and others that cared about me.  Yet, there was one person I never wanted to lie too and that was my partner at the time.  He didn't seem to have the same convictions as I did because he lied to me about everything and everyone.  Doesn't matter now I suppose because he has moved on and found someone new, and I am happy for him.

But what is it about me that makes people want to lie to me and hide things from me?  I have been asking myself the same question for quite awhile now and I think it was the caliber of people that I was hanging around with.  They were lying to themselves and I was just an innocent bystander.  See the culture that I was exposed to was the meth community and I can tell you that when someone is on that drug they are wanting to screw anything that walks and breathes essentially. Honestly, they aren't trying to lie to you, they are trying to justify to themselves exactly what it is that they are doing. It just happens that they have lied to you in the process.

Now that I am sober again, and I have been analyzing the situation and the background that I have come from I can see it plainly now.

Yet, even when I wasn't doing drugs people have lied directly to my face.  These people were trying to spare my feelings.  See, sometimes when you are sick and going through some terrible things.  Those around you want to cheer you up and make you feel better about yourself.  What they don't understand is that you can see right through them and know that they are lying too you and that make you feel even worse about yourself and your condition.

I have been sick for so long and people are always trying to cheer me up by telling me that my color is good or that I am filling out that I have gained some weight.  I can tell that these are bolstering techniques and are meant to make me feel better, but what they actually are doing is making me look hard and closer at myself.  My judgement then becomes that mush harsher on myself than it should be.  I am my own worst critic and I have never liked the way I looked and have never thought of myself as attractive.

So it is my fondest wish that everyone who knows me to be 100 percent honest with me.  Tell me like it is, and if you can do that for me, maybe it will become habit for you and you can do it for everyone else.  I am so tired of hearing what everyone thinks I want to hear, just tell me the truth.

Remember that the truth starts at home. You must start with yourself and then work your way outward.  That was the lesson that took me so long to learn for myself.  I have always found it easy to lie to myself and rationalize my behavior and habits, but it was hard for me to stand up and be a hundred percent honest with myself.  So I had to start at home and focus on my inner self before I could shift the focus to the outer world.

So remember if you can be honest with yourself it will definitely be easier to be honest with everyone else.  Keep in mind that trust is built by showing how honest you are too others.  So build your foundations on truth and understanding and you will see that your relationships are stronger and will last longer.

As always my hopes and dreams are with you,

Uncle B

Have you ever lost yourself in a relationship? How about lost your focus on life?

If you are like me and have lost your sense of identity and self in a relationship you will know what I am talking about in this blog post.  Sometimes it is so easy to get wrapped up in a relationship that you isolate yourself. You loose touch with your friends and you begin to slowly lose your sense of individuality.  When you go into a relationship you begin to start thinking in terms of we and us and not me and I.  Believe me this is normal, but where is the separation?  Where does the us stop and the I begin? That is even harder to figure out.  Because in a relationship it is about building and doing together. It is about compromise and growing together as a team.  But what happens when one of the team wants to be control everything and you have no separation, you have found yourself suddenly alone in a relationship, your friends are not there because you have not been keeping in touch with them, you and your partner have been focussed on building and doing and not cultivating separate friendships, all the friends you now have are mutual.  Where do you turn, who do you talk to.  How do you regain your sense of purpose?
There maybe internal pressures that have helped to mold and shape you. You have become so dependant on the one you are with and if they aren't uplifting you and pushing you to excel they might be holding you back.  Are they putting you down? Are they actually damaging your self-esteem? Your self-worth? Did you wake up one morning and wonder who you were, who is the person you are with? Have no idea where you are going in your life and you seem stuck? I did and I will tell you once you have lost your self it is very hard to find that person you once were. It is hard to focus on the choices you have in front of you and do you feel that you are not worth anything, you have lost direction and focus and honestly don't know which way to turn.
I have been there, I am with you.  What it took for me to get past my past and focus on my future was my best friend looking at me one day and telling me that he didn't know who I was anymore, what happened to the person that he knew and the person who when he set his mind to a task forged ahead and accomplished it no matter what the cost.  The person who walked to his own beat and didn't care what others had thought.  I had to sit back and reflect because he was right that person was gone, what was there was a scared and broken person who couldn't see his own self worth, a shell of the person he once was.  A person who once had direction and purpose in his life was now absent from the picture. 
It took me almost two full years and a long journey of self discovery and reflection to rebuild and find myself again.  If you haven't been to the place I am talking about then count yourself among the lucky.  Many of us find love and relationships but it isn't with the right one. We settle, we get comfortable and we stop living and begin to merely exist.  We take the criticism of our partners to heart and we let our pride and individuality mesh into a common mold of what society believes a relationship should be.  Here is the thing, no relationship is perfect, no partner is perfect, we are not perfect.  A relationship is a growing evolving partnership between two individuals, to build and work together for a common goal or good.  The key is a partnership between individuals.  We must maintain our individuality within our relationships, we must keep our individual friends, we need to make mutual friends and have a common path that is conducive to both parties involved, but we must maintain a slight distance.  A relationship becomes unstable and co-dependent when one of the parties begins to loose themselves in it.  They surrender all power to the other individual, and become mired in the we and us dilemma and never reach the goal they had originally started for, they have lost their way.  When, that happens it is also very easy to lose your sense of worth, your sense of importance, and you begin to feel worthless and useless and are mired in despair.  If you go on like that not only will you be miserable, you will do miserable things and you will begin to resent your partner, you will look for ways to get back at them, you will try and out do them.  It then becomes a constant game of who can out do the other.  This is defeatist, it is destructive, and it is harmful to all parties that are involved.  You become entrenched in a rut and you cannot figure out a way to get out of it. 
I cannot tell you what the right way is to end this but I can tell you how it ended for me.  It took total separation and then soul-searching and a lot of encouragement from peers and friends to look past and beyond where I had been.  It took inner peace and asking for forgiveness, admitting I was to blame, that I allowed myself to get caught in the trap.  I also prayed, meditated and studied a lot about myself, I sought out patterns and discovered that all our lives are filled with patterns and that if we do not break and cut from the pattern we are on we are prone to repeat it over and over again.  I learned that the person with the power in a relationship is the one that cares the least.  Whenever we care what another person thinks, or we let another person influence our decisions, we are giving that person the power over us.  We surrender our individuality to them and we become followers instead of leaders.  No one should have the power to make you feel bad about your decision, what you are wearing, or what you look like.  Show the world who you are let them see your colors.  Express yourself in the way you dress, the way you style your hair, the jewelry you wear, the words you speak and write.  You are what God created an individual.  You need to make partnerships and relationships that work and benefit you.  If you truly love yourself you can do it. You don't have to wrap yourself within a relationship to have a purpose.  You don't have to be the person who sacrifices everything for another.  This is supposed to be a partnership, partnerships are formed for protection, benefit of both parties and for reaching a common goal.  A partnership is made up of individuals, that come together with a common background, purpose, or goal and they work together to build something new and extraordinary or to benefit each other or the community at large.  Look at Doctors, dentists, surgeons and other professionals that form a type of partnership, they have come together to offer a service, reach a goal or in some way enhance one another by their association.
Is this a hard journey? Yes it is.  Is it worth the effort?  Yes it is! Can you do it? Yes you can.  But you need to take back the power you have given to others around you, you need to reflect and recognize your own value and your own self worth.  You are a force of nature, something to be reckoned with, realize you don't have to be held down, there is a way out and you don't have to be a shell of yourself.  If your partner or mate cannot see this and recognize it. Then it is time to pack your bags and leave, you must do for yourself and you must love yourself.  Don't let your heart become filled with anger and hate.  Don't let bitterness take over your life, make a change, do something, and if you don't know what to do, do anything, it will be better for everyone involved and those around you who care.
After all of this, time will heal the heart and the pain that you have felt. The bitterness and anger will slowly dim, but you have once again found yourself you are not existing anymore you have returned to the land of the living. Too many of us are dead merely just existing, coasting along life's highway never asserting ourselves into or upon the world we are content to just be in the world.  I tell you this from my heart, it is better to be in the world and part of it, influencing and making change than just sitting back and taking what it throws at us.  Please follow your own drum.  Be an individual, be a doer, an achiever, you have it all with in you. You are beautiful, courageous, strong, intelligent and above all else you are unique and cannot be replaced by anyone else. 
Keep the faith, know that there are others out there that are struggling and going through similar circumstances, you are not alone and will never be alone.  Trust in yourself and in your heart.  Know that you are blessed and can survive and make the changes you need.  Know that I am here for you, I have been where you are at and I have made it through and the processes that I went through have made me a stronger self reliant person and I know what I want and I am going to get it.  So can you. I know you can and I have faith in you.
As always I value your thoughts and would love your feedback. Drop me a line or leave me a comment I want to hear from you. 
All my hopes,
Uncle B
bryanzepp@gmail.com