Up All Night: Honesty

I love my friends. Joking and trading stories with my friends makes everything I do meaningful. I would choose not to live if I had to live alone. I've never realized how badly I needed other people in my life until I moved to a new place and had to establish an entire life for myself! The course is mine...time to play. Friends are one of things I have now that I haven't always had. I've been extremely diligent in my pursuit of learning social etiquette. However much I've embarrassed myself while travelling this path, I'm glad that I'm on it.

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Earlier today, I swam with a few of my friends. I'm not an accomplished swimmer. Mostly I enjoy stretching, floating, and kicking my arms and legs around in a wayward and uncoordinated fashion. When I was very young, I had just moved into a new house with my parents. We had an above-ground pool. I was playing in it with some other kids my age, and my parents made me leave suddenly. They told me that I had to leave because some people were working on our deck, but all the other kids were still there. I found out that I had to leave because we were all going to eat. That's when I discovered the concept of the "white lie".

"White lies" are like breathing to me. So many people around me do it, and now I catch myself telling them so often, that I'm no longer sure if honesty in itself is a virtue. There are so many other priorities that I've observed people to place over honesty: comfort, personal safety, simplicity, time-saving, peace, politeness, discretion, flattery...there are so many reasons not to be honest that I can't even list most of them.

I still prefer friends who are too honest over friends who are too polite. I'll take honesty over politeness any day of the week. When I hear negativity or criticism, it's easy for me to have hurt feelings. It's easy because I tend to take criticism personally. That's the problem: what if people didn't take the observations of other people personally? Every human being is equally fallible, makes mistakes, screws up, is ignorant about most things...there's no shame in being wrong. There's only shame in refusing to make things right.

I prefer people who help me overcome challenges and improve my character over people who pretend that I am without flaws. I like people who have moxie. I like people who are assertive. Am I still going to use a lot of "white lies" in my daily life? Yeah, I am. I'm not sure what else to do. Honesty, in a social context, is one of those sticky prisoners' dilemmas: honesty past a certain point only works if everybody is using it, but people won't start being more honest by themselves. Who has to start?

I've learned an immeasurable amount in my life up to this point, and many of the things I've learned have taken me much longer to learn than most other people. I know sarcasm, snark, and white lies. I can deploy all of these in my interactions on a daily basis. Most people don't know that I used to have no idea how to do any of that. While I'm glad that other people understand me, I'm still puzzled that I need to learn how to hide my feelings to more clearly communicate with the rest of humanity! We are so weird.