Grow Into Your Truth

A short story about accepting others' truths about yourself, while growing spacious in your own

This is a story I wrote in October 2024 and tweaked it recently. It is posted on my website, but I thought you might enjoy it here, too. Thanks for reading. Hope it gives you something...

“The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away.”
― Leland Val Van De Wall

A seed falls to the earth, the offspring of its mother’s genetic endowment. It lands upon the ground, where rain pushes it into the soil, slightly acidic — a small part of a total environment in which its mother and hers before her, generations and lifetimes ago, adapted to survive.

As the seed begins to germinate, given the water, light, and temperature in which she thrives, ants and mycelium tickle the roots. As the seedling begins to grow into maturity, she seeds and feeds the mouths of many life forms, across many lifetimes. Through it all, she stands tall—weathering storms and steadily expanding her reach.

If the life that witnessed stages of her growth could talk in ways all other life could hear, and you could ask any one of them:

“Do you know the tree?”

They’d each say, “Of course, I know the tree.”

“She’s grounded,” say the ants and mycelium that tickled her roots as she began to germinate, all those years ago.

“She’s flimsy,” say the beetles and caterpillars that crawled along her gummy trunk as a seedling, when her leaves had just begun to form.

“She’s fun,” say the opossums, who ran up and down her trunk and hung from her branches as the sapling took up more and more space.

“She’s dusty,” say the winds, who helped pollenate her flowers when she reached maturity.

“She’s tasty,” say the butterflies and bees, who consumed and sprinkled her pollen.

“She’s bountiful,” say the squirrels who consumed her sap and acorns.

“She’s spacious,” say the birds who built nests from her twigs, as she shaded the ground below.

“She’s mom,” say the seeds that grew into saplings there at her base.

“She’s sturdy,” say the humans who used her shade, leaned on her, and bore witness to her final stages of life.

All of these forms of life would know their truth about the tree. The tree could hear any of those statements and agree or disagree, but it wouldn’t make the statements untrue, exactly as more information would not change their truths.

Meanwhile, the tree, old and wise—the only witness to all of her experiences and stages of growth—would be the only one to know her Truth, from seed to fruit.

“I’m all of these things and more. And now, I’m rotting, but it has been a life well lived,” says the tree, who knows herself best.

Everyone has a different story about you and your being. All of those stories are true, they just aren’t the full Truth. Like the tree, the “truth” varies by vantage point—but one’s history, one’s cumulative experience, their Truth, is their own.

To be able to accept the idea that everyone’s views about you are true, for them, is difficult because, often, we have much more information to invalidate it, whether their truth is something “good” or “bad.”

Holding others’ truths as true (but not the whole story) does not invalidate your own. At any given moment, you are the center of a confluence of variables—nothing more, nothing less—regardless of the labels conditioning may ascribe.

So are they.

Others’ stories about you reflect their own histories, contingencies, and vantage points. But your Truth—the only one that captures the totality and richness of your lived experience—remains yours alone. The challenge is to stay gently rooted what you know to be the Truth of you. Others might remain rooted in their own truth, but might also grow, too. In any case, you remain a source of life for others.

Author’s Notes: Through the Mycelium

This story was inspired by the large oak tree in my front yard, its visitors, and someone telling me I was one way — and my reaction to their label. They weren’t wrong, but, in that moment, I knew they weren’t fully right. Yet, I didn’t make any attempt to correct them. It was freeing, to stay rooted in what I knew to be true and letting them stay rooted in their version, knowing I wouldn’t be able to convince them otherwise — not with words alone, not without future action.

Hope you have a day in which you can accept others’ truths while holding your Truth constant. When it gets difficult, perhaps go hug a tree. They see the bigger picture, across many lifetimes.

“She’s wise,” says the human trying to stay gently rooted in her own Truth.