The truth, the whole....well, some of it

One year-ending, in that brief period when I tried such things, I resolved to try and be completely honest. I guess the real point was to see how feasible it was, and how long it could last.

This is not something new. Camus' The Outsider revolves around the concept of somebody who is direct to the point of alienating others. As was Rand's Fountainhead (the only redeemable facet of that entire book). Heck, you could even go all the way back to Yudhistir.

The experiment lasted three days.

Not just because people cannot handle unadorned honesty, but because I realised I hadn't defined - or understood - what I was really aiming for. The whole thing came unstuck when I tried to decide if the point was to be completely honest, to be Truthful, or to just not lie. A rough summation of how I ended up seeing them is thus:

Not lying is, by far, the easiest of the three - even though it's possibly the most difficult one can ever do. Not lying is not just refusing to say untruths, but also not evading a direct question, or not qualifying any answer. With all the attendant backlash it may bring. A reactive process, if you will.

Honesty is a more active process. It's not just about not lying to others, it's also about having no secrets at all. It's about going up to them and telling them how things really are. And more importantly, extending the same to you. Acknowledging your faults and limitations, your prejudices, your passions, your patterns, your self. Almost-attaining-nirvana-difficult.

After that, you have being Truthful. Which is picking-an-angry-porcupine-with-your-buttcheeks painful. This is looking at every little aspect of every thing around you, and meeting them on the terms that they deserve. It means not being able to promise anything, because you know that you can never guarantee something, only that you will try to make it happen. It means not being able to use definite terms such as always and never and totally and absolutely*.

Defining this, and determining what all I could be honest and truthful about, proved to be a more fruitful usage of time than trying to be completely honest and truthful. It was also a defining period for me, because once you really begin to look at - and accept - who and what you are, life becomes that much easier to deal with. It's a continuous process, and you go on discovering and accepting new things. I've learn to live with and feed off anger, I've accepted and learnt to live with Existential Schizophrenia, and I've seen how easy it is to write and publicly display verse once I accepted I wasn't a Poet.

The point of this? A relevant example of the difference between not lying and being honest. The former would be letting you continue to believe something that sprung up here, and has been perpetuated through a process of assumption, new people reading classificatory* statements made by people who've made those assumptions, and - eventually - by the lack of confirmation or denial by the one person who could clear the matter (that would be me).

The latter would be me telling you not to continue to labour under that misapprehension***.

To wit, this blogger is of the male persuasion.

The comment space is yours to vent vitriol.


PS. Why now? Why not when Flaffy cast me as KSA's sister in her epic? Why not when Pri classified me under the 'Girls' section? Why not when people addressed comments to me as 'Missy'? Because, well...umm...hey look! See the pretty birdie there (scampers off)
PPS. Remember the bit about Perceptions? See what I mean?



* And no, that's not ambivalence, it's just about realising that what you think you can or aim to do is influenced by and can be derailed by various factors.
** If that's not a word in the dictionary, it bloody well should be.
*** Which doesn't mean you need to know everything else. I gave up on the complete bit, remember?