How Honest Is Honest?

A new friend and I were talking the other night because she had just finished reading my memoir, which she said she couldn’t put down. Then she added, with a slight laugh, that she was amazed by how ‘honest’ I had been within it.  Most of the nitty gritty details of my life are in that book, from the time I was a child. Opening the pages to women I didn’t know at all  did feel strange to me when my three female colleagues/readers urged me to add the workbook to the memoir and ‘go public’ with it. Nevertheless, that is what I did. And I have been told by many women who have taken the three-day workshop using the book and the questions therein as a guide, that it was precisely my honesty about my strengths, faults, mistakes (including whoppers), joys and shame that enabled them to examine their lives with courage, so that they, too, could be freed from the memories and feelings that have held them back from moving forward in their lives with an open heart.  I know this to be true, but I do still wonder, sometimes, whether I should have included all the experiences that I did.  What ‘secrets’ am I entitled to, if I want other women to look at  all the detritus of their lives?  I am still not sure.  I do believe that the reason I no longer feel shame about the two divorces and other messes from my past is that I wrote about them in full.  Writing about my own participation was somehow more freeing for me than discussing it in therapy, although I am not sure why.  Again, I have been told that talking about shame, grief, trauma and joy in the workshops lifted long held burdens for the women who have done so in the workshops.  The courage these women have shown never ceases to amaze me, so perhaps that is my answer.  It was important that I share all of the details that I have so that these women could do the same, and could find relief.  It has been amazingly rewarding to me to know that I have helped other women make peace with their pasts, and I wouldn’t take it back for anything in this world.  I also believe that my own exploration opened the way for the man I live with to come into my life, and for us to work through our issues and have a relationship with very few bumps that sustains us both.  The things we realize when we write….!