What’s Wrong With Telling the Truth?
I am a self described Truth Teller. That’s not to be confused with “a keeping it real” chick, or a woman with no filter who alienates her family and friends as in the Love and Hip Hop and Real Housewives franchise reality shows. I simply prefer to tell the truth in any given situation, instead of the little white lie that allows others off the hook, and makes me look charitable.
Many years ago I fancied myself as an Advice Columnist for a now defunct local paper. One of the questions I remember receiving was the following:
Man: I think my girlfriend should go and surgically remove her FUPA before she goes on vacation with me, but I don’t know how to tell her this. Should I feign an excuse and cancel our trip next year?
What? I thought. Why doesn’t he just tell her! It’s his girlfriend and who else would tell her something so sensitive. Of course I could read in between the lines. She had recently had his third child for him thus creating the dreaded panniculus, and now he didn’t want to be seen with her in such a state. Never mind that he had kept her in girlfriend mode instead of making her his wife. I answered by telling him if he was going to marry her, he should give her the money to go and have the plastic surgery. If he wasn’t looking at her as wife material, he should either shut it, or be a wimp and feign an excuse.
What I really wanted to say was in any scenario he owed her that money! He helped to mold her midsection into a undesirable lump of flesh, so he should spend his money on helping her look the way she wanted to look.
I’ve come a long way since then and I’ve honed my truth telling skills. I’m the friend who gives you the honest answers when you come calling. I can be candid, and I can be factual. Yet I know when to sugar coat the truth for the mildly to overtly sensitive. This tactic does not always play out well however, and necessitates that I don’t put myself in certain positions. For example, I don’t go out with multiple girlfriends at once, because someone will inevitably show up at my home dressed like a clown. Good friends are hard to come by, and the loss of a friend due to her willingness to stay as a basic bitch on a party night…well it won’t be happening at my house.
Another way I avoid unnecessary truth telling is by not getting too close to acquaintances who overindulge in life, but don’t seem right. For example, people who are morbidly obese and are way too cheery or conversely, gym obsessed zumba instructors and miserable. I am convinced they all have a hidden disorder that they wouldn’t willingly confess to if I were to ask them. As Joan Rivers would have said “can we talk?”, I know their answer would be a solid “no”.
Speaking of confessions, I recently told a social acquaintance that I believed she has an anxiety disorder. It didn’t go over too well. The signs were all there, the heavy reliance on coffee to get through a night shift, cigarette smoking to help calm her frequent irritability, the inability to meet a significant other, and no close friends to speak of. Also, on more than one occasion she had verbally expressed that certain co-workers were “jealous of her” and were out to sabotage her in one manner or another. I didn’t mention that I also thought she was paranoid and delusional. I didn’t have to, because just telling her about my first observation was enough to make her decide not to talk to me anymore. Perhaps my truth about her behaviors and attitude were seen as an unsolicited opinion. Or maybe in her mind I had now become jealous of her too.
What makes me a so called authority on truth telling? Well, you have to know the truth about yourself and be willing to hear that back. I am aware of most of my flaws and insecurities, and would welcome someone who wasn’t a random stranger telling me something new about myself that I hadn’t already discovered in my soul searching endeavors.
Another recent situation where the truth had to come out was when my partner’s troubled twelve year old niece came to stay with us for a second time. Two years had passed since we last saw her in person, and she had changed remarkably. Unbeknownst to us she had turned into a gossipmonger, and carried news about different family members, trying to turn us all against each other. It was quite alarming, actually. Eventually, after gathering all the facts, I said in no uncertain terms that I didn’t like who she was, and that she was not a good person. Of course I followed this up with ways she could repair her self-esteem and tame her desire to be liked by everyone, and she seemed to get it at the time. However, she now shuns us on Facebook as she continues in her path of daily selfie-pic taking, cursing out friends, and publically disclosing personal family mishaps. I’m still hopeful that the lessons we taught her about life will one day resonate in the forefront of her teenage brain.
I realize that certain people are more affected by words than others. I’ve read the “5 Love Languages” by Gary D. Chapman, and those whose love language are “words of affirmation” don’t seem to take kindly to unpleasant truth telling. Yet, when delivered in the correct manner and when coming from a good place, I believe truth telling will help people evolve, hopefully before they die. I’ve had many a friend and acquaintance come to later agree with my assessments, and share their experiences afterward. Most are now more honest with themselves and others, and are happier in their daily lives.
The one exception to truth telling is this: do not insist on being honest with people who have a diagnosed schizophrenic disorder. I’ve learned that no matter how much you share the truth with someone who is a bona fide schizophrenic they won’t grasp the meaning behind your honesty, value your opinion, or grow from any unpleasant truth you share. You may even get yourself into a dangerous situation. True story.
Regardless, if you are a authentic truth teller you will not be able to stop yourself from saying what you truly think to anyone, regardless of mental capacity, as it is a part of your nature. You just have to keep to delivering the truth in a socially acceptable manner, and from a place of love. So genuine truth tellers unite, and help change the world for the better — one truth at a time!
“Respect for the truth is an acquired taste”. ~Mark Van Doren
More about me here.
