Love, truth, and honesty

I started writing this post yesterday. I was able to write a few paragraphs then decided to save it as draft, for continuation at a later time. As the few readers of this blog know, my posts are notoriously long and sometimes do not follow a set, logical flow. And when I sat back down to continue writing this post, I realized that I couldn’t add anything to the few paragraphs that I had managed to write.

So I deleted everything and decided to start anew.

My original intention in the post was to write about the three things in the title (from a hit song by Bananarama in the late 80s). The last thing I wanted was for the post to turn into another rant-piece about people (former friends or lovers) who have wronged me through either their emotional ineptitude or their stunted sense of ethics. I think I have done quite enough of that. It’s becoming too easy to write, frankly speaking.

A refrigerator magnet in a friend’s house reads: ‘I bitch, therefore I am.’

I don’t remember the first time I ever told a lie. All I know is that I was a very young boy when I did it. Looking back, the lies that I told back then were, for the most part, products of my wild imagination. I imagined myself to be much better than I actually were (to a certain extent, I think I still do). Many times, the lines between my imagined and real self would get blurred and I would end up saying things to people that were either exasperating or were simply untrue.

The fact that I was never penalized for these pronouncements somehow validated my thoughts and deeds. I think my mother basked in the fact that I was an imaginative child because she believed it connoted creativity and consequently, a higher level of intelligence.

But something else happened. My active imagination was largely tolerated and, to a degree, even nurtured. And all these imaginings (and daydreaming), I think, made me lazy. To lazy to live in the real world, so to speak. This laziness did not come in the form of not going to school or not doing school work–a schoolage child’s tasks. In fact, I did quite well in school. The laziness I’m referring to came in the form of ennui, and more frequently, complacency.

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