Disclaimer: if you’re someone who uses this phrase regularly, I have nothing against you. Seriously: my favorite person in the world, my beloved husband, uses this phrase regularly. Most people don’t really think about it when they say it, and that’s fine! It’s just become a normal part of the English language nowadays, unfortunately. So please don’t take this post as an attack. I’m just taking a moment to wallow in my irritabiliy and give my inner “armchair critic” a moment to sound off, because it’s fun and cathartic, and what else is this stupid little personal blog for if not a bit of fun and catharsis and sounding off.

A word or phrase that annoys me: “my truth.” As in, “speak your truth,” or “I’m telling my truth.”

In addition to simply sounding, imo, annoying, snivelly and whiny, à la “safe space” or “love yourself” or “holding space for…” or any of those saccharine pop-psychology catchphrases that turn my stomach — it’s also philosophically disastrous.

There is no such thing as “my truth”! There is only the truth.

What I have is: a perspective, an opinion, a point of view, a version of events, a personal understanding of what things are and how they happen… but that is not the same as truth.

I get it. It’s just a saying. “My truth” is just a cute, concise, and heartfelt way of expressing all of what I just listed in the above paragraph. However, I still take issue with the phrase, because I think it betrays a flawed understanding of reality.

We say more about ourselves than we mean to. Often, the way we use language conveys things about us that we don’t even realize; there’s more meaning in our speech than just what we’re trying to convey literally with our words. When we use phrases like “my truth,” it exposes a basic belief (or at least a tolerance, a passive acceptance of the belief, which essentially amounts to belief) that truth is subjective. That there is no objective truth.

Which is of course false, and hugely problematic. I suspect that the rise of the phrase “my truth” is just another symptom of (here we go again, with Mith diagnosing grave societal ills while sitting in a recliner nursing her baby, but) this grave societal ill of “me first”-ism. “Self-love” gone haywire.

Our culture these days is so secular, and so self-centered. “Just be a good person” and “just accept everyone and let them do what they want (unless they are Christian)” seem to be the religious tenets that we live by. Celebration of the self and its carnal appetites is a heroic virtue, to us. There is no objective truth — truth is just what any individual wants it to be, and no one has any right to tell them otherwise! To believe in objective truth is offensive. It’s a violation of others’ individual freedoms. “Freedom,” not being subject to any law but ourselves — that’s what we’re all about.

Which is so far from a healthy and sane understanding of reality and our role in it. The truth exists independently of us, and we ought to serve it and be subject to it. We need to acknowledge that our faculties are limited, that we are small and dumb, that our little POV is not the be-all/end-all — far from it. Something greater than us exists, and that’s the truth… but some of us aren’t ready to hear that.

There is no “my truth.” There is only the truth. Saying “my truth” just makes you sound juvenile and flaccid of heart.

Ahem, alright, I’ll hop off my silly little soapbox now. I’ll just leave you guys with this quote from Scripture:

John 18:37-38: ” ‘For this was I born, and for this came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth.’ … Pilate saith to him: ‘What is truth?’ And when he said this, he went out again to the Jews, and saith to them: ‘I find no cause in him.’ “