On Honesty

I’m back to my usual this week, with another post from a prompt born out of 642 Things to Write About by The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

That’s what the prompt is, “on honesty.” It’s one of those prompts that can be intimidating because you don’t know where to start, but it can also be exciting because it’s a writer’s blank canvas.

So here I humbly present my musings on honesty. Let me know what you agree and disagree with in the comments.

Honesty is one of those things that get more difficult as we grow up. Not because it’s harder to be honest as we grow up, or because we find more ways to be dishonest as time passes, but because honesty loses its simplicity over time.

When we are kids, we are told to tell the truth when a vase breaks while we play with a ball inside the house or how our faces got smeared with chocolate when our t-shirts are covered in crumbs. When we begin getting crushes, we can’t be honest with them and tell them how we feel because we don’t know what would happen if we do. We can’t tell that one girl we don’t want to be friends with her anymore because we don’t like how she talks to us in front of other girls because we’ll be the weird person who sits alone at lunch.

When we’re adults, we can’t always be honest with our partners about a choice they make for worry that it’ll make us sound selfish and hurt their feelings or make the choice more difficult. That silence is dangerously close to lying, and a lack of honesty here snowballs into resentment over there.

Honesty, it would seem, grows with us. It gets more complex as we get more complex, as our desires, goals and fears evolve and have layers on top of each other and interconnected branches and roots. Even with this complexity, we’re always expected to know when “honesty is the best policy” and deal with the consequences of our choices either way. What if we don’t know if or when honesty is the way to go, or if we don’t know what the consequences will be either way?

Perhaps the hardest kind of honesty is being honest with ourselves. It’s not impossible to lie to ourselves, to pretend we know better than to stop or start a behavior or thought pattern – until we dig ourselves into a hole and honesty just gets more complicated. There’s less accountability, more bending around the consequences. So how can we ensure that we’re always honest with ourselves?

So maybe honesty doesn’t need to be complicated, but being honest can sometimes be complex.