Let Go of the Lie

by Ann Voskamp

They say you gotta live free. But when my Uncle Paul started chasing me through the house with that snake when I was four? I found out you could live mostly with eyes just bugging out of your head, the lying fears strangling you right there at your thinning neck. Sure, he didn’t mean anything by it. Uncle Paul, he’d just turn out the lights in the yellow-tiled farm kitchen. Then he’d flick on the flashlight and spin it round till the light was all flooding up that glossy, two page National Geographic spread of a beady-eyed snake with its mouth sprung wide open like some fanged cavern ready to pierce me, devour me, erase me. Yeah, that was the beginning.

You can spend your one wild life trying to outrun glossy lies.

Grade 4, Josie Miller said I must be wearing clothes from the bottom of some garbage bag from the Sally Ann. (Which wasn’t actually true. We wore what my Mama found on 25 Cent Day at the Salvation Army and actually, you could pick from whatever thrifted clothes you could find from any shelf. Plastic bags were merely optional.) But yeah, whatever – I still let that glossy lie of ugliness snake up me a bit.

So when Melissa Truscott said I was butt-ugly, you can bet I felt the venom of it. And when Mrs. Munford said I wasn’t really smart enough for her class – “You only made it in here by the skin of your teeth, Little Miss Ann, and don’t you ever forget it” – I never did. Not one day ever.

And not one day ever did I miss turning down the sheets slow and careful, because there could be snakes curled and lurking between the cotton. There can be lies about ready to poison you everywhere you turn.

Lies that began in the beginning, that start in your Garden, that hissed with masked innocence, “Did God really say…?” And the doubt all bit us.

You can look at your face there in the mirror every morning and look right into your eyes and you can feel the hiss slithering right up your neck: “Just look at you – you’re damaged goods. You’re never going to be good enough, smart enough, together enough, liked enough, wanted enough, to do anything that counts enough.”

You can hear it everywhere you turn, the deafening auto reply stuck right there in your caged head:

“Loser! Time Abuser! Mess Producer! Who needs you? She’s so much better, just look at her? You actually thought that was a good idea? Open your mouth and they’ll laugh long enough you’ll shut your mouth. You aren’t productive enough. You aren’t good enough. You aren’t enough. Who do you think you are?”

I ain’t four anymore, but I still got glossy lies flashing fangs at me. I got these lies that slither out of the most unexpected places and I got fears that make me freeze: fear of failing, fear of flailing, fear of arrows, fear of the way marked narrow, fear of that sheer rock in front of me that begs me to believe and be brave and climb.

Climb out of that drugged, dead comforting pit they call the status quo and break right through the earth and into the life you were born for, in the now of your life, while there is still time and hunger in your veins.

Turn around and shake off that snake because its head’s been crushed, no – PULVERIZED. So, for the sake of God and you still breathing with time – LET GO OF THE LIE.

Love,

Jared