“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
You’re standing on it. It starts to crack. It shatters. You’re fully submerged in cold water, struggling to find a way out. You feel the dirty, mucky, surface touch the bottom of your cold feet. You trudge through the muck. You make it out. You’re alive. You’re polluted and wet. You feel embarrassed that you stood on thin ice or you’ll just take a hot shower to wash all of your dirty sins away.
Lies. Easy to come by, hard to make. They can catch you in their sticky web, or set you free. If you have the chance, wouldn’t it be easier to fly freely? Instead of having a spider chase you around, spin you up, eat you? According to the human race, sometimes being tangled in your lies is easier than telling the truth — because the truth hurts; it’s painful. But I thought pain was inevitable; and suffering is optional. Ah, yes. The truth is inevitable, but your lies are optional.
Often you lie to the most important person in your life, yourself. Internal dishonesty is worse than any lie. By telling yourself something that is not true but, in fact you know it to be true, is one of the worst feelings on the planet besides nausea. You are constantly living with weights on your shoulders, the stress of knowing the truth, but refusing to believe it. For instance, telling yourself that being afraid in your own home is normal. That it is normal to constantly have the pressure of being perfect on you. That being taken out of your own home is normal. But, you know that it is not, and you try so hard to keep smiling because that is what you were taught to do, that is what you have been conditioned to do. You’re just like Pavlov’s dogs, running to the lies and the fake smiles at the chime of a bell.
Your parents teach you that lying is wrong yet, they contradict themselves by telling you that Santa Claus is real. They tell you to say “I love my present!” even if is exactly what you didn’t want. Of course, that is being polite according to Emily Post but, you’re still lying and lying is a sin.
When you lie to perhaps, protect a loved one, are you really protecting them? If you love them, don’t they deserve the truth? And maybe if the truth is going to hurt them, it wasn’t meant to be. People constantly enter and exit your life, and with the amount jelly beans you have left, they should not be spent worrying and stressing about lies. When you lie to yourself, you’re already building a faulty structure that will fall when the earthquake comes. So start with truth, and with truth comes trust, and trust is hard to build and easy to lose, even within yourself.
Obviously, there are unavoidable faults with this, as lying is a coping mechanism and sometimes is necessary. But really, all I am trying to tell you is that, enjoy your life, lying to yourself is never worth the happiness it might cost you.
