One of the things that I value and hold dear is ‘living my truth out loud’ and I have been thinking about what does living the truth out loud means to me. What does living one’s truth out loud means anyway? Truth doesn’t have to be a big ass scary thing. It could be little and simple things that our heart secretly aches for and the things that we find so simple and ordinary that we tend to question if this could be our truth.
As humans, we are accustomed to the feeling of being liked, belonged and validated by the people who we surround ourselves with. That’s natural and completely normal but if we let only this to become our entire truth we tend to find ourselves being lost in the process. When I say, living my truth out loud, the loudest voices tells me that I need to read, write, paint and just be myself and follow my intuition and my curiosity and allow myself to want the things I want even if they are wildly different in this world that is desperate to put us in well-rounded similar kind of boxes. It becomes hard to own our story when our entire motivation is to fit in and not make some waves, bring attention to us and how we want things differently, to take up space and to claim what’s ours; our truth and our voice.
I have come to the conclusion that your truth is rooted in your experiences, your journey, and your belief systems and all of them come together under the umbrella of your story. It is our choice to embrace that story and stand tall or hideaway.
I have been scared to start this blog, sharing my thoughts out loud, writing letters to the community, sharing my art online and on Instagram, in short, I had been terrified of putting myself out there and live my truth out loud because of the judgment that I feared but I have come to realize the more I have started to share my truth out loud, the more real conversations have started taking place everywhere where I am present at both online and offline. I feared that what I have to say either doesn’t matter, I don’t have anything worth sharing or that my truth looks entirely different from others. The thought that I embraced and has comforted me the most is, this deep secretly aching desire shows that I do have something to share. I find myself repeating, ‘I believe in, living our truth out loud’ more and more often nowadays.
Living your truth doesn’t mean fixing you in some way. For me, it simply means simplifying and freeing you and your voice, the real you that hides behind the people pleasing and looking for validation and trying to fit in, embracing the real you, those secretly aching desires and owning your story. Adding out loud only means that you are walking your talk.
From my personal experience, the minute I gave myself permission to uncover that truth and give it some space to come to life, I started noticing tiny yet impactful implications of it in myself and my creative work and life. It has brought me more confidence in myself, my voice and more courage to own my story. In other words, more self-acceptance and less self-judgment. The more I am walking the talk, the more I am feeling grounded in who I am, what I stand for and the more I feel at peace with my journey and my story.
Living your truth out loud not only gives you permission to embrace it but it also gives everyone else around permission to live their truth out loud. The more you tell your truth, the more ideas and stories you share, the more you inspire, encourage and help others in an impactful way.
Uncovering that truth is the real hard work and it requires you to unlearn quite a lot of things including the stories you have about yourself, societal paradigms and freeing yourselves from the societal expectations to be in a certain way and to want certain things at a certain time in your life. The gap between what life you are currently living and what kind of life you are aching for can become a starting point to uncover your truth.
There are a few questions that I have been asking myself lately to uncover that truth and get to the heart of it so I can cultivate enough courage to claim what was mine all along and live it out loud.
What do you stand for?
What are your values and how do you want to show up in your creative work and life?
And the most important of all, what does your heart secretly long for?
I want to leave you with this question, are you living your truth out loud?
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It’s such a powerful act to put yourself out there like that, and to share your art! I love your content and I think if you put yourself out there, the right people will eventually find you.
Oh Dee, Thank you for your heartwarming words. I couldn’t agree more. Putting yourself out there is something you can control and keep showing up and that self-belief is contagious.