What If My Heart Honestly Doesn’t Agree With You?
Over the past 12 months, I have suffered no less than three existential crises.
By existential crisis, I mean an extended period in which I deeply questioned my purpose, my values, and my moral integrity— and seriously considered the possibility that I was just straight-up “living my life wrong.”
I think the universe was trying to get the same point across to me in all three crises — but it took a few repetitions before I finally got the message.
The first of my existential crises was brought on by a friend who told me I was a substance abuse addict — and was lying to myself and others about it.
I understand why my friend reached this conclusion. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve used substances recreationally since I was a teenager. And at the time when my friend made this accusation, I was relying on intoxicants to help me avoid problems I needed to confront. I happen to believe this was all part of my learning process, and was something I had to work through in my own time — but that’s not the point I’m getting at here.
My point here is, my friend assembled a network of facts we both agreed were true …into an analysis which they also presented as an objective fact.
“If you look into your heart with total honesty,” my friend told me, “you’ll see you’ve been lying to yourself.”
I’m certain my friend’s intent was to awaken me to a greater truth. Instead, the accusation that I was being dishonest with myself and others sent me into a spiral of self-doubt that left me unable to get out of bed for a week. It had me calling up family members in the middle of the night, asking them to please tell me if this accusation was true; if I’d been lying to them, and to myself, all these years, and if they’d been waiting for me to come clean about the fact that I was a self-deceiving addict.
Honesty has always been of paramount importance to me — and suddenly I was questioning if I’d been lying to myself, and everyone I love, for years.
As it happened, every single person I spoke to told me my friend’s accusation was exaggerated at best— but that’s not the point I want to make, either.
Even if my loved ones had agreed with the diagnosis and told me it was time to check into a rehab clinic, that still wouldn’t change the point I’m making here.
My point is that — as I finally pieced together after a week of depression and self-doubt and frantic midnight phone calls — my friend’s analysis was not a fact, but an opinion presented as fact.
My second existential crisis resulted from a conversation with another friend, who told me none of us are really special — and I should get used to it.
To be fair, my friend made this statement as a throwaway comment in the course of a long and intricate conversation — and I’m sure they had no idea, at the time, of the impact it made on my sense of reality.
But if my other friend’s substance-abuse accusation had left me questioning my own honesty, this conversation made me question my very sanity:
“If you’re being completely honest with yourself,” my friend told me, “you have to acknowledge there’s nothing we can say or do as artists that hasn’t been said and done a million times before.”
And for the second time in a year, I found myself too depressed to bother getting out of bed. My creative work crashed to a halt, since none of it seemed to have any point if originality was impossible. I made another series of late-night calls to my loved ones, asking if maybe my friend was right, and I’d been lying to myself all these years. Maybe none of us are special after all — maybe even creativity itself is a deception we practice to distract us from the stark reality of our ultimately meaningless lives.
As one of my loved ones put it: “…do you think that’s maybe a bit harsh?”
To my friend’s credit, they walked their position back quite a bit when they saw how deeply it had upset me. In later conversations, they admitted that this was all just one person’s opinion — and the fact that this viewpoint had proved useful for my friend didn’t mean it had to be true for me.
So my second crisis resolved on a more positive note than the first. But in the end, I arrived at the same realization: my friend’s analysis might have been based on objective facts — but it was ultimately a subjective opinion.
My third crisis erupted from a conversation with a friend who told me my writing reinforces problematic attitudes on gender.
This friend probably made the most compelling case of all three. They marshaled a collection of evidence that any lawyer would’ve been proud to present in court — all woven together in a well-worded argument that any sensible person would seem to have no choice but to agree with.
And for the third time in a year, I found myself staring down the same eerily familiar call to action:
“If you look through your work and are completely honest with yourself, you’ll have to agree that this is true.”
For the third time in a year, I found myself deeply doubting my personal integrity. I couldn’t drag myself out of bed. I spent sleepless nights talking with my loved ones, asking them to please level with me if I’m some kind of closeted misogynist. All my creative work got put on pause. What’s the use in writing, I thought, if even my most sincere attempts to portray characters I admire come across as subtly undermining the very points I’m trying to make? Maybe I’m just another old cisgendered heterosexual white male; and maybe no matter what I try to say in my work, the voice that comes from my throat and my keyboard will always be the voice of the whip-cracker; the slavemaster; the abusive cheating husband; the tyrant; the oppressor. Maybe I and people like me should do the whole world a big favor and just shut up.
I know people who certainly feel that way. But I don’t think this particular friend is one of them.
And the more I did what my friend asked — looked at my work in total honesty — the more I found that while I agreed with certain aspects of their criticism, other aspects of what they said just didn’t resonate with me.
I don’t think that’s because I’m being dishonest with myself, or about my work. I think it’s because my friend’s criticism is an opinion, and my views on my own work differ from theirs.
I think many of us have forgotten how to present our conclusions as OPINIONS, not facts — and to make room in the world for people who simply don’t believe the same as we do.
Growing up in the evangelical Christian church, I was taught that if I looked into my heart with total honesty, I would see I was a sinner and needed Christ’s redemption. I looked deep inside myself, as I was told to— but I didn’t see what I’d been told I’d see. Instead, I saw all kinds of hypocrisy in myself and the leaders placed over me, and I ended up leaving the church as a result.
Years after that, I was living in Istanbul, where a very articulate Muslim friend told me that if I looked into my heart with total honesty, I’d have no choice but to admit that Allah is the one true God, and Mohammad is his Prophet. Again, I did what my friend asked — but when I looked into my heart, I didn’t find an Allah-shaped hole there. Maybe my friend had such a hole in his heart — but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find one in mine.
And to this day, I’m still not totally sure I was right in either of those cases — or in any of the three situations I outlined above. There’s always the possibility that I missed something, and would believe differently if I had more pieces of the puzzle.
I can’t help thinking of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said:
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
What’s our goal, really, when we present our beliefs as facts — when we ask others to “look into their hearts” on the assumption that if they fail to reach the same conclusions we have, then they must be practicing self-deception?
In those moments, is our desire truly to help others understand themselves more fully— or are we more interested in “helping” them think like we do?
I think it’s important we remain open to the possibility that others may look into their hearts with total honesty — and reach different conclusions than we want them to.
This isn’t to say, of course, that people don’t practice self-deception. The world contains many substance-abuse addicts who legitimately do need treatment; many content creators whose work sadly lacks the spark of originality; many old cisgendered white men who speak hateful and oppressive words and still sleep soundly at night, convinced with absolute certainty that they’re doing the right thing.
