“Portland is our forever home.”
I must have said it a thousand times. It rolled off my tongue like a love letter.
It felt effortless. It sounded beautiful.
And it was completely untrue.
We lived there for thirteen years. And for thirteen years, that line never wavered. I said it constantly. At dinners. In passing. Whenever someone asked if we’d ever leave. It was one of those things I just knew about myself—the way you know your coffee order or your side of the bed.
Forever home.
Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? A declaration of rootedness. Of knowing where you belong.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand about beautiful lies: they don’t feel like lies. They feel like poetry. They feel like identity. They wrap themselves in meaning and comfort, and you hold onto them not because they’re true—but because they’re beautiful.
My wife and I are both self-employed creatives. We can live anywhere. There was nothing tethering us to Portland except a sentence I had kept repeating until it hardened into fact.
Thirteen years of the same story, running on autopilot.
I wonder if you have one too—a beautiful lie you’ve been telling yourself so long it feels like who you are.
“We have a great relationship with our in-laws”—when really, you’ve just gotten good at performing.
“My boss gives me a lot of autonomy“—when really, they just don’t care enough to show up.
“We stay because of the schools”—when really, you stay because leaving feels like admitting something you’re not ready to say out loud.
These aren’t always lies, of course. Sometimes they’re true. But sometimes they’re just beautiful.
And we mistake beauty for truth.
What cracked ours open was spending a month living somewhere else.
We weren’t trying to escape. We were just curious. And within days, something shifted. We felt alive in a way I hadn’t noticed we’d stopped feeling. Present. Awake. Like someone had been dimming the lights for years and we’d just found the switch.
The beautiful lie had been doing its job—keeping us comfortable, keeping us certain. But it was also keeping us asleep.
I’m not here to tell you to move. Or to abandon your commitments. Or to blow up your life.
I’m just asking you to sit with this:
What’s a beautiful lie you’ve been telling yourself?
The one that sounds so lovely, you’ve never thought to question it?
The one that answers the question before you’ve even finished asking?
And if you’re having trouble hearing it, remember—the most dangerous lies aren’t the ugly ones.
They’re the ones we love too much to let go.
P.S. If you read this and thought I might have one of those too—that quiet nudge is worth paying attention to.
On Wednesday, February 25 at 5pm PT, Kathy and I are hosting a one-time live session called The Beautiful Lie.
We’ll go deeper into this story than a blog post allows—the full thirteen years, what we couldn’t see while we were inside it, and what it actually felt like to name it out loud.
And then we’ll create space for your own beautiful lies to surface. Because beautiful lies don’t reveal themselves through thinking harder. They reveal themselves when you’re in a room where someone else has gone first.
No recording. No repeats. Cameras on. 90 minutes. 30 people max.
$149 — join us here.
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