Vain Words

I heard a man tell a woman yesterday that she was very beautiful. I think it’s nice to hear a person compliment someone else.  I try to compliment the people I care about on a regular basis, to not only let them know how much I care about them, but that they are important me, and I think about them, and consider them valuable.  I want to encourage the good gifts I see in them. There’s not enough of that in this world. We are so quick to judge, condemn, and/or use compliments as a form of manipulation. We want to lay blame.  

On the whole, as a society, we don’t value our words. We make promises we don’t keep. We profess affection we don’t actually feel. We placate, manipulate and eviscerate with our words to justify ourselves and our actions, or in retaliation of our own insecurities and pain – pushing others down because we believe it’s the only way to succeed.  We are politicians, pundits, and word panderers.  If we want a strong society, we need to educate in truth - even if the truth hurts, is ugly, or isn’t popular.  We need discover discipline and self-responsibilities. We need honest encouragement. Simplified – we need to do the hard shit regardless of how we feel or what we want - so we can feel fulfilled and satisfied with what we want and how we live.

The problem with the aforementioned man’s compliment was this:  I knew the woman he boldly proclaimed as beautiful. While she has a pretty face and thin body, she’s far from anything I would consider beautiful. She is cruel, manipulative, and has such low self-esteem and daddy issues her life is a complete mess. She’s a drama-filled, drug-addled train wreck. Not trying to be mean here, just telling the truth.  I’ve known her for years, have tried to help her, but she’s a walking sociopathic disaster and doesn’t care who she hurts.  I wouldn’t wish her on my worst enemy, yet I often hear her being told how beautiful she is by stupid shallow men. She has a skewed view of beauty just like the men who reinforce it.

I also saw the meme again that says, “I fall in love with souls, not faces.” I really wish that was true for most people, but it’s not. Often not even for the people who say they believe and agree with the concept.  I fell in love with my ex because of that phrase, mainly because I believed he did love souls and not faces, but he was a liar. He’s just as shallow as that man who complimented that ‘pretty’ vampire (I call this type soul-suckers – people who are empty and dead inside and with their selfish narcissism will suck the life out of someone else to try and fill the emptiness within themselves).  He had a beautiful soul that loved him, but it wasn’t enough. I’m not trying to lay blame, I’m just speaking truth. He wasn’t a man of his word, always made promises he didn’t keep, always had ‘good intentions’ but no action to follow. He was full of empty words, constant failure, and was undependable. I didn’t hate that he lied to me. I hated that I learned to not trust him.

I’m also not making these statements because I’m a bitter, lonely, plain Jane, jealous of the attention other women receive.  On the contrary, I am told quite often by men and women that I am beautiful.  Unfortunately, most of those compliments come from strangers who don’t know me and only see a pretty face.  But, that compliment that comes from those who do know me, who knows my character, and who can see my soul - those words mean the world to me and have power over me and I appreciate them. 

So, be careful what you say and to whom to say them. Mean what you say. Let your words have power. Be a man or woman of your word. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Be honest. Be truthful. Be generous and look for the positive in those in your circle. Be free with your compliments (as long as they’re true) and swim in the deep waters. Get away from the shallow vampires – there’s only death there.  Don’t tell ugly people they’re beautiful. Don’t tell beautiful souls they’re ugly. Don’t say the words, “I Promise” or “I Love You” unless you mean them. Our words have the power to heal or destroy, to build or tear down, to empower or to weaken. Don’t lie – even if the truth hurts – just don’t lie. Call a liar a liar, a vampire a vampire, an asshole an asshole – you might just save their soul. But if you don’t care about their soul, keep your mouth shut.  The world is full of politicians and liars, don’t add to their number.

Know this …if I compliment you, I mean it.

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray

Lies and Love

We are all liars. We lie to each other, but mostly we lie to ourselves. We create these ideals of what and who we are, and when things happen in our lives, we often get hurt and confused when they turn out to be something we didn’t expect. We don’t mean to lie to ourselves, in fact, we don’t often know we’re doing it. But the pain of the lies we tell ourselves, well, the pain hurts us really bad. Most often, even in the midst of the pain, we can sometimes still refuse to see the truth.

Why do we think it hurts so much when we’re disappointed, when our faith is tested and we’re deemed wanting? We hurt partly because we believe we failed on some level, but mostly because we were deceived, things didn’t turn out as we had imagined them, as we had hoped, as we had believed. We try to blame everything and everyone else for that pain. But if we really look at each situation in our lives, the worse of the pain stems from realizing we were wrong.

When I found out I had cancer, I instantly wondered what I had done wrong in my life to have deserved this punishment, to have earned this disease. That’s how I’m programmed to believe, that there are consequences for my actions, that for every action there’s an equal or opposite reaction, or there’s a blood price to pay for the sins we commit. When my ex-husband told me that he was never attracted to me or was never in love with me, I thought I deserved that, too. I didn’t deserve to be loved. The things I loved died. When my father would beat me for talking back to him or denying him, I thought I deserved the pain. The things I challenged hurt me. I was disobedient, and how can the universe, God, faith, or science honor disobedience? Even the natural laws of the universe have abstracts. When my oldest daughter ran away from home, I thought I too deserved that, after all… I ran away. I had just begun the journey of loving myself, loving my body, and loving my mind, and daring to love someone else when the cancer attacked. But it wasn’t the cancer that hurt me; it was the lies, the fantasy of a life I had created for myself, and those around me.

I ran, not so much from the people I loved from this crazy idea that it would hurt them less when I died if I was already gone, but I think I ran more from the dissolution of the dream world I’d built for myself, the hope of a life I dared to dream, and the reality of that dream didn’t live up the fantasy. Not even the man I thought I loved lived up to the man I had imagined. That’s not his fault, that was mine. It was unfair for me to build him as I had. He was perfect. He was simply amazing. Was he as I imagined him? Far from it, but I liked the lie. I fell in love with it. But as with all lies, the truth finally revealed itself, and I got hurt. No, I shattered.

So, here I am now, at a new place in my life, a strange place, because I can’t explain what happened to me, what happened to that dreamer, but I somehow I changed. I have slowly been piecing myself back together. While there are familiar fragments of the woman I used to be, I’m something different, I’m something new and the way I look at life, love, and living is something new too. Could it be another lie I’m telling myself? Maybe. I know I’m capable of it. I’m a writer after all, which makes me a master manipulator, an imaginative dreamer.

I don’t say this about being a liar as something derogatory. On the contrary, some of the lies are beautiful. The truth is always hard, always absolute, always concrete, but we are fluid, moldable, movable. The truth of life for me at this time is that not everything in my life is beautiful. There are struggles, there are strings, there are twists and turns, uncertainties, and a whole lot of choices. But there’s also adventure, discovery, and even love.

I’m falling in love again… in love with my life, in love with my body, in love with my mind, in love with my gifts, in love with my passions, in love with my sense of adventure, and in love with love. I might also be falling in love with this one particular Dominican Marine. Love has hurt me deeply before, broken me, shattered me, but I’m ready to try again. I’m ready to dream again, and the truth is… this is what living is all about – falling down and getting back up again. Love isn’t the broken pieces of my life, it’s the glue that keeps putting those broken pieces back together again. And that, my friend, is no lie.



Till next time,



~T.L. Gray

Just Between Us

I talked to a friend of mine last night, and something she said won't leave my thoughts.  Her words made their way into my dreams, and haunted me again this morning during my run.  I couldn't understand what it was about her proclamation that affected me the way it had, and I think I’m only just beginning to grasp why. Perhaps as I write this post, which is what happens often, I’ll finally see the clarity into why her words hurt me.

I’m sure by now you’re asking, “Well, what the hell did she say?”  I’m also sure you’re expecting it to be something profound and revelatory, especially now that I’ve put those thoughts into your head.  But I doubt that’s the case.

My friend is in love.  She’s met a great guy and they’ve been talking a lot lately and I can’t help but revel in her excitement.  I like talking with her because her enthusiasm is infectious.  It’s even more so when we hang out together in person because I can just feel positive energy emit from her body in warm waves.  I strive to someday be that happy, but I suppose I’d like it to be on my own terms  -not because someone else is involved.  I sincerely believe that if someone else is the cause of such happiness, it also means they have the power to control it.

I kept a smile on my face as she chattered along at what felt like a million miles a second (I do the same when I’m excited) until she said something that literally made me wince and cringe and I felt a sharp pang run through my body – almost like the way my body seized when I dumped that bucket of ice water over my head the other day.  She said, “I wish I could tell the world about this wonderful guy and how happy he makes me, but he’s such a private person and has asked me to keep our relationship just between the two of us.  It’s nobody else’s business and would cause unnecessary trouble.”

I get that, I really do.  I have some very private friends, and I try to respect their privacy as much as I can.  But there’s this part of me that just wants to scream and slap them all upside the head and tell them all to go fuck themselves.   Before anyone gets all defensive, let me explain.

I’ve SEEN, FELT, EXPERIENCED and SUFFERED under the blanket of secrecy.  Predators, liars, cheaters, abusers, cons, and manipulators work behind secret smoke screens.  They can only be successful as long as their victims keep their mouths shut.  That’s why I’m such an open person, because I’ve been victim… perhaps to every one of those.  I grew up in a lie. My silence aided in my abuse and the destruction of my family.  I’ve been lied to, cheated on, and used because I’m naïve.  I want to believe the best in people, but people let me down all the time and they hurt me tremendously.   Last year I had a ‘friend’ who was the best friend anyone could ask for, so encouraging, so supportive, said all the right things for all the big changes I was going through.  But, he wanted to remain ‘private’ because he didn’t want his other friends to be jealous.  Turns out… he had several other private best friends, and a wife, and a few lovers on the side.  Though we were only talking, I felt so betrayed, because I know had I not discovered his deception our relationship could have become more and I a bigger victim. It was a wakeup call.  Yet a lesson I still have yet to learn.

I refuse to live in secret, because that is my strength.  I have nothing to hide in this world, and nothing in which to be ashamed.  I make mistakes, bad decisions, am prone to foolishness and embarrass the hell out of myself all the time, but I’m honest.  I try to show the best of me as much as I can, but I don’t hide the ugly parts either.  I am exactly what you see.  While I change with every experience, I’m not a different person at different times.  I am simply me.  Love me, hate me, admire me, despise me – it doesn’t make a difference.  YOUR opinion can hurt me, but it won’t change me.

I do my best to try and respect my friends privacies because it’s who they are and I don’t try to change who they are… but they should respect me too… they should know and understand that I’m not like them.  If they don’t want the world to know they’re my friend, then they shouldn’t be my friend.  Because my true friends would know how secrets and lies hurt me.  I can keep intimacies private, I’m not an idiot, so don’t ever ask me to keep my relationship private, because that will be the moment you’ll lose me.  That wounded little girl that lives inside me is getting bolder and stronger.  She whispers to me, “If they can’t claim you in public, they sure as fuck don’t deserve you in private.” Even Jesus said something similar – “If you deny me before men, I’ll deny you before my Father, and say I never knew you.”

This post isn’t about my friend or her new boyfriend.  I wish her the best.  With all my heart I hope he’s not a liar and a cheat – because that’s often the biggest reason for privacy.  This post is about me discovering another of my triggers – those things and issues that set me off and sends me spiraling.  The more I understand those things that hurt me, the more I learn to maneuver around them and purge them from my life.  These last couple of years have been a huge journey for me – I’ve done so much purging and so much  refilling – and the transformation has been amazing.  Learning to love yourself is not easy – because it requires taking a huge dose of truth.  Truth hurts, but deception, especially self-deception, destroys.

What saddens me most – is knowing that tomorrow will most likely change in light of this new revelation.  NOTHING is guaranteed, no relationship is granted, no promise that those I love and admire today will even be in my world tomorrow.  I wish with my whole heart there were certainties, people and things I could count on that would always be there – but that’s probably been the biggest lesson I’ve learned. Again, I say, NOTHING is guaranteed. The ONLY person that I will find for sure in my tomorrow, should I live until tomorrow, is ME.  That’s why it’s so important that I learn to love me, to trust me, to find happiness and peace within me.  I’m the only person that will be there with me until the end.

I say, “I’m sorry” in advance for those who I will leave behind.  You either love me or you don’t. I’m so tired of wasting my time on people who won’t love me, don’t love themselves, or don’t have the balls to be honest.

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray