#1: Welcome to Confessions of a Truthaholic …

Notes from my journey to finding, understanding. and confronting the TRUTH ... and other curious endeavors.

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 occassional 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 a 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 and measurement tools of DEI programs and social justice programs?

• Who am I to ask those who assert “rights” claims to identify and explain the nature and source of “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 greivance 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. Funny stories and other curious endeavors included.

Thank you for coming along for the ride.

It’s quite messy, but it’s all true.

I appreciate you!

xoxo,

Kelley

November 19, 2022