Her mother asked, during a phone call that touched on her sister’s wedding ceremony, whether she still believed.
She said yes. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. It was the most accurate word for something she couldn’t explain in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon phone call.
She believed in something. She wasn’t sure anymore what the something was. She had stopped going to mass three years ago and hadn’t told her mother.
Faith is often maintained in its public form long after it has changed in its private one. The word we use when our parents ask remains the comfortable version of a truth that has gotten more complicated. It isn’t deception. It’s the recognition that some internal journeys have no clean translation into the vocabulary your family uses.
And sometimes, the private change is not yet finished enough to explain.
I understand the incomplete answer. The gap between what you actually believe and the version you offer to people for whom the nuanced version would be a disruption. The yes that is true in some direction even if it’s not the whole truth.
She said yes. Something in her does still reach. She just doesn’t know anymore what it reaches toward.
When will she tell her mother what she actually means?
There is a real cost to carrying two versions of your faith. The private one, honest and unresolved. The public one, offered to protect both yourself and the people who love you. The gap between them has its own kind of loneliness.
She loves her mother. She loves her enough to spare her the Wednesday afternoon version of the question.
She isn’t sure she loves herself enough to let someone into the honest one yet.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Is there something true about yourself that you haven’t told the people closest to you?
- What would the honest version of your answer look like if you gave it?
- What’s the cost of carrying the gap between who you are and who the people you love think you are?
You might also find yourself in He Never Told His Family What His Real Life Looked Like..
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.