I believe life truly began for me when I stopped living based on what others might think of me, but instead what I think of myself. To do that, I had to learn to open up to my life and the lives of others. To believe in something, and not to live it, is just another way of lying.

My path to openness was not easy, and was a long time in coming, a wise woman warned me that most of the people in my life would run away from me, or me from them, and that was true.

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,” wrote the author Margery Williams Bianco in The Velveteen Rabbit, “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I decided to live an open life the same day in May, 2007 that I first published the Bedlam Farm Journal. I was recovering from a serious breakdown in my life and mind and heart, and a devastating round of depression and anxiety.

I was weary of telling lies about myself, and of rationalizing and excusing my deteriorating life. It doesn’t work, at least not for long.

It’s truth or nothing, I told a therapist. “I’m close to nothing, I want to try the truth.”

The primary lesson I learned in my recovery and awakening was that I had been lying to myself, and also, unknowingly, to my readers. I made a vow to myself that I would be authentic in my writing, and open in my blog and my life.

Khaled Hosseini wrote in the Kite Runner that the trouble about openness is that people who mean everything they say think everyone else does also. They will learn otherwise.

I believe my Dyslexia has challenged me to be open and helped me. When  you can’t see the world as clearly as other people do naturally, then you work harder to see the world at all.

No secrets, no dissembling, no hiding or masking the truth. I was warned repeatedly that this openness was a mistake, that I would regret it and, that the people would not support it or read it for long. It seems dangerous to so many people.

These warnings turned out to be wrong, as so many warnings are in our  warning happy world.

I always remember my good friend Al, who spent years conquering his gambling addiction and getting his life back, and how he set out for a wonderful new job and life and stepped in front of a bus on the first day of his new job.

The bus ran him over and ended his life.

Sometime before he died, he told me that they never warn you about the things that are really dangerous in life – like living for money or gambling – they just mostly warn you about the things that aren’t likely to happen.

There are people who are offended by the truth. I am now offended by lies.

A woman wrote me this wonderful message just two days ago saying “I just expected some cute farm blog, I am a farmer’s daughter. Boy, was I surprised. You tell the truth!”

Music to my hears.

And I must not forget the many people who have stormed off in a huff, departing in a cloud of accusations and indignation, accusing me of being a monster, a bully and a hypocrite. Noel Coward wrote that “it’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

Coward was prescient.

I am not completely open, completely honest, completely authentic. I don’t write as I age about my rather small sexual organ (oops).

I shield some parts of my life – I rarely write about what happens inside the farmhouse  – but being authentic about my life, good or bad, has become an article of faith for me.

I consider the blog my great work as a writer, my living memoir. I owe the truth to the people who read it, anything less I consider a betrayal.

And I am sad and sometimes despairing at how many people tell me honesty shocks and surprises them. I never imagined it as a marketing plus.

I think our culture quite often advances the idea of hiding, cowering, acquiescing, and withholding of the truth.

There are great rewards to the open life. I have no secrets. Mark Twain said if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. He was right. Openness is liberating, I shed the very great and oppressive weight of worrying about being discovered, or of keeping track of my lies.

I do not ever lie to myself, at least not knowingly. I do not withhold important events in my life, that would be cheating my readers.

People tell me this openness can be helpful to them, they see their own problem in me and my own journey.

There are problems about an open life. A number of people close to me have felt hurt, or badly treated, or misunderstood, or made uncomfortable by my writing. Many people tell me they wouldn’t dream of being so open, they consider it frightening, even dangerous.

I have lost some friends in this way from being open. Telling the truth, writes Clarrissa Estes Pinkola, sometimes causes us to be exiled from others. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. The truth, wrote Joe Klass, will set you free, but first it will piss you (and others) off.

I sometimes think, as Orwell did, that telling the truth has become a revolutionary act. In the Marketing Age, truth is often buried under an avalanche of lies and distortions. Everyone says they care about us, but hardly anyone does if you don’t give them money.

Honesty and authenticity make me vulnerable, I recognize that. But I want to be honest and authentic anyway.

Since I am no saint, or anything close to one, my being authentic can be ugly and disappointing. To some, it is refreshing and engaging, a kind of oddity in the Corporate Nation. I sometimes have wondered if the cost was much higher than the reward. I see that the reward is, in fact, much greater than the cost.

Everything precious in my life – Maria, my  blog, my photography, my books – came in the wake of an open life. Because an open life literally opens the door to feeling and meaning. Living a lie, or lying to oneself closes the door, I’m not sure I can explain it any more clearly than that.

Writing authentically is, to me, the core of good writing. When I write about my life openly, I  can see the reality of my life and begin to understand it. When I hide from my life, it begins to unravel and fall apart. That won’t happen to me again. An open life attracts change.

For the first time, I have perspective that is close to reality.

Openness is a state of mind, a faith.

And finally, the real things have not changed.

It is simply better to be open and truthful; to make the most of what I have; to be happy with simply pleasures and simple truth, and to have the courage to move forward when things go wrong, as they will inevitably do from time to time.