Absolute Truth

As I struggled to come to terms with the illusions I had taken to be the truth, I slowly found hope after years of feeling hopeless.

Absolute Truth?

What do you know to be true – absolutely, incontrovertibly true?
That right is right and wrong is wrong?
That there is good and evil?

Well, for me, for over 40 years I though I knew that I am inherently bad so I tried hard to be good.

I spent my whole life judging others by my strict standards and making them right or wrong, good or bad, better or worse than me. When I found someone I thought was better than me I would look hard for proof that there was something wrong with them. I would burrow away till I found something, something that would set my mind at rest and prove I was better after all. In the meantime, I was riddled with jealousy at their apparent superiority to me.

Liberation finally came when I realised that my “truth” was a barefaced lie. The supposed truth of my innate badness, an insecurity for which I had amassed evidence over many decades, was nothing more than a story I made up as a child when I gave myself the label “bad”.

But we are not defined by labels and yet we allow ourselves to be defined, to be limited in what we can be. I am defined if I state I am a gay man, a lawyer, a middle class Englishman, a brother, etc. I am all these things and so much more. In fact, I am anything I say I am, so I declare to you that I am a poet, an inspirational writer, and therefore I am. Whether you like my writing is irrelevant. Whether I am good, bad or indifferent is irrelevant. I just am.

In fact, if anything is true, it is just that we are vessels empty of anything except love; the supposedly incontrovertible truths are just silly notions that rule our lives and kill our love.