This is episode two of six in a short minisode series for my new book, Let Go,

available to purchase until August 5th.

Each episode shares a thread from the wider fabric of Let Go,

a moment, a shift, a truth.

The night before Dad died, one of my aunts, who was several V-Nos in, pulled me aside and said,

It's a bad time your dad told you the truth about your mom.

I told her there was no need and internally rolled my eyes. In my head I was thinking,

you clearly don't know what we've already lived through.

You clearly don't know what we know. But as the years went by, I started to wonder, is there

something we don't know that everyone else knows about? I'd long felt that something was off

about my understanding of the events from our childhood, and that understanding came from an unreliable

narrator. Of course, we humans love to seek closure, and it's understandable, but sometimes the

person or people in question aren't around to give it, and sometimes they're around, but very true

of us.

They're believing they have something over you can make them feel like they have power over you.

You can also find that in the quest to try to drag the truth out of them, that you wind up breaking yourself in the process, you become somebody else.

So I had to accept what I knew wholly and fully at that time. Secret or not, I already had the truth. Maybe not all the facts,

maybe not the full emotionally mature admission I'd hoped for. But I knew what had happened in my life. I knew what

I'd lived and that dad hadn't shown up for us in various ways and also that he'd covered up a

truth and taken the hit. I could live that reality even without the full download.

It's like when you finally tell yourself the truth about that

crumb-filled relationship you kept blaming yourself for. You realize you don't have to wait for

...