#29: A Year (or Two) in Review

28 Confessions Down ... and Myriad More to Go

And So the Journey Goes and Goes and Goes

I started writing this Substack in November 2022. A lot has changed since then, in the country, around the world, and for me.

Perhaps things have shifted for you too?

As we turn the page from 2024 to 2025, I thought it’d be a good idea to kickstart the new year with an overview of where my little newsletter has been and where it’s going.

Confessions of a Truthaholic was born in both frustration and desperation. I was exhausted by the insanity that befell us and wanted one thing and one thing only: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but THE truth.

And so I began …

Having no idea what I was doing or how Substacked worked, I named my newsletter and wrote the “About” page. I recently reread it for a refresher … and thought you might enjoy seeing how it all got started too. Hence, I’ve copied it below.

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ABOUT

Welcome to Confessions of a Truthaholic …

I’m Kelley Keller and I became a “writer” on December 19, 2021.

I was smack dab in the middle of a series of personal and professional crises and desperately needed a way to process the crazy. My therapist always told me to “give it to the paper” to get it out of my head.

And, so I did.

I wrote on the backs of junk mail envelopes, paper menus from the previous night’s takeout, CVS receipts (you can write an entire treatise on those), rainbow-colored sticky notes, and the occasional paper towel.

Soon enough, this effort was creating more chaos than calm. I needed a better plan. But I hate journaling. Like, really hate journaling. It’s pure drudgery for an extrovert. We’re stage people, we need an audience for sustenance, no matter how small.

With paper notebooks out of the question, I decided to write online. This would be raw, unedited, unpolished. A bunch of first drafts. By posting on social media, my content would be irrelevant mere hours after it was posted, so it seemed pretty low risk.

Facebook had jumped the shark, Twitter’s 280 character limit wasn’t going to work, but LinkedIn had increased its character limit to 3,000.

So LinkedIn it was.

On December 19, 2021, my LinkedIn journey began.

There was just one chink in my armor.

I’m a lawyer and my professional crises were related to the implosion of my small law practice during COVID. My longest and most important team member, my paralegal of seven years, passed away in June 2020. Her replacement was diagnosed with breast cancer a week into her tenure, and her replacement’s mother died two weeks into her tenure. And that just the beginning. Suffice it to say, my paralegal’s death activated a domino effect of destruction.

The ethical rules for lawyers leave little room for error … aka little room for the limitations of being human … so I needed to be wise.

How much should I say, or could I say, in my posts?

I didn’t know the answer, but I was in the throes of a walking nervous breakdown and was a basket case. I needed an outlet and the risk of not showing up was greater than the risk of public exposure. I needed to show up and “tell the truth,” for me. No charades, no bubble wrap, just the truth.

My posts evolved into small stories (3,000 characters max) in support of a simple TRUTH in the style of Aesop’s fables. Here are a few examples:

• TRUTH: It All Hurts, So Pick Your Pain Wisely

• TRUTH: Every Choice Has Fangs

• TRUTH: You Don’t Have to Let it Go, You Just Have to Make a Deal with It

I concluded each post with an actionable takeaway related to the title’s TRUTH. It was cathartic … and gave me something happy to do each day.

Of course, I never expected more than three loyal fans …

1. my husband

2. my mom, and

3. me

But something magical happened along the way.

More than three people read my posts and the process of writing daily about the TRUTH opened space for me to show up in my life in an entirely different, and very unexpected, way.

My writing actually mattered. It gave others the words to process their own feelings without revealing them in public.

It was a love fest.

Until it wasn’t.

The fork in the road ….

In a world where Enlightenment ideas of reason, science, religious tolerance, and the “natural rights” of individuals such as life, liberty, and property, are being cast aside in favor of postmodern worldview focused on the death of reason, moral relativism, and rejection of objective truth, I learned that my writing rubbed some people the wrong way.

• Who am I to claim “ownership” of objective truth and abstract principles in our postmodern world?

• Who am I to ask questions about the specific goals of DEI programs and social justice?

• Who am I to ask those who assert “rights” claims to identify and explain these “rights”?

In the space of about 5 minutes, my skin was a sin, my belief in objective truth rendered me “out-of-touch,” and my support for criticial thinking was highly suspect.

C.S. Lewis said “Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” And, this stuff was nonsense.

But, it was dangerous and angry nonsense, full of invective and distrust, and I needed to understand why. I needed to find the bitter root and explore the dark underbelly of this new grievance culture run amok.

I needed to find answers to my questions … but no one was talking.

Confessions of a Truthaholic documents my ongoing journey to find the answers and ultimately to the TRUTH. Funny stories and other curious endeavors included.

Thank you for coming along for the ride.

It’s quite messy, but it’s all true.

Off to the Races

I published my first post, a welcome post, a few days later on November 18, 2022, and have been writing small stories ever since.

Consider the context …

Recall that in the fall of 2022, we were just two years out from:

• Trump’s first term, including Russia, Russia, Russia, and a massive technological censorship of non-compliant speech,

• the hot mess of the 2020 election and its aftermath,

• the rise of BLM and its instigation of the violent summer of Geroge Floyd and the subsequent conviction of Derek Chauvin,

• a dramatic onslaught of antiracist and “white supremacy” discourse (cue DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist),

• the 1619 Project had been published and disseminated throughout public schools,

• SCOTUS decision Bostock v. Clayton added LGBTQIA2S+ rights to the 1964 Civil Rights Act,

• COVID (enough said), and

• the sudden and rapid onset of gender dysphoria, particularly among teenage girls, had swept through the country like wildfire.

Now we’re two years out from the fall of 2022 and things have gotten insidiously worse.

• biology is bigotry,

• failure to support and/or provide puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex “reassignment” surgery for kids became a cancellable offense for the laity and physicians alike,

• the patriarchy finally died and the transgender patriarchy was born,

• any regulation or restriction on abortion is now akin to enslaving women and denying them their most fundamental rights, including access to “reproductive justice,”

• free speech is actively challenged as a relic of white supremacy and the “old order,” so it must be eliminated,

• President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris pissed on The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and got deeper into bed with the United Nations by elevating Agenda 2030 and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals above American domestic and foreign policy decisions, regardless of its disastrous impact on American sovereignty and citizens,

• the southern border was purposedly destroyed to support illegal immigration on a mass scale,

• the third branch of government, the Supreme Court, has become a focal point for progressive attacks on its legitimacy, without one ounce of evidence to support the allegations,

• Artificial Intelligence is on a tare and most of us are clueless, particularly in the context of the push for transhumanism, and

• what it means to be human has become the central issue of our time.

Naturally, there are many more issues I’ve not mentioned, but the above is a good start.

These aren’t simple partisan spats, but existential issues that require us to consider who we are as a nation and who we are as individuals. They also require us to consider where we’re headed as a nation and as individuals.

Make no mistake, we’re engaged in a multi-front ideological and technological war of worldviews that’s been brewing for 150 years. It’s finally coming to the surface and voraciously vying for the hearts and minds of humanity.

Circling the Wagons

If I’m being honest, I didn’t think much about any of this stuff until it started thinking about me.

In time, I came to understand that we all use the same words, but we use very different dictionaries. Only then could I begin to get my head around the alternate reality being shoved in my fact, but I still had no idea from whence it came.

But, I do now. And, as you know from my writing, it goes all the way back to the beginning … of everything.

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This is the year I will continue sharing my journey to the bottom of the well — asking and answering the BIG questions — and uncovering the origins of barbaric anti-natal and anti-human attitudes in our time.

If we don’t know what a human is, what a person is, or what features or attributes qualify someone for human rights, how can we communicate about anything?

We can’t.

And perhaps that’s the point?

This is a difficult topic that makes most of us feel quite vulnerable and uncomfortable (mentioning creation as a model for origins alone freaks people out), but the longer we keep our noses in the sand, the worse it will get. Until it’s too late to say - stop, I didn’t mean for it to go this far.

Think of it this way.

When we remove the parental consent requirement for minors to have abortions, to socially transition to the opposite sex at school, and/or to obtain puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, we effectively eliminate the legal category of “minors.” Absent this fixed category, the incapacity of a child to consent on his/her own, hence requiring a parent to consent on his/her behalf, disappears. And that goes for anything, including having sex with an adult, whether by force or by choice, or having sex with a relative or stranger, by force or by choice. Man/boy love simply becomes male love.

Once the first domino falls, it’s hard to stop the chain reaction. The second, third, and fourth order effects are the logical, forseeable, and necessary consequences of upstream decisions, even if unintended.

Think on that for a moment …

Most of the time it’s better to be unpopular and right, than to be popular and wrong, especially when it comes to kids!

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Thank you, as always, for supporting and sharing my work. I deeply appreciate your commitment to my words - it keeps me going.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year!

I’ll see you in the next post.

xo,

Kelley

January 4, 2025