Truth vs. Fact

I wrote "Promise" a few months ago. After I shared it with my mom, we ended up having a long talk about it. She admitted that part of it made her upset. She felt that I was misrepresenting her and not being completely honest. The section in question is when I talk about getting "kicked out" when I was 17. In her view that is not how it happened. She saw it as giving me a choice. I made the choice to leave so I was not actually "kicked out."

This led to a good discussion about how people can perceive the same situation differently, or truth versus fact. Whatever the facts of the situation were, the truth is that I felt like my mom was kicking me out of the house. That was a big part of the reason such a rift developed between my mom and I. We have since healed that and I couldn't ask for a better relationship with my mother. We are very close now.

Anyway, the sometimes clashing ideas of truth and fact can be tricky to navigate. Sometimes, in the tricky world of human interaction, facts aren't as important as truth. Sometimes we have to ignore the facts of the situation and get to the truth, the feelings, the emotions before we can overcome a problem and find peace.