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.

As I grew older, expectations from me increased exponentially as well. I skipped a grade in primary school and graduated from elementary at age 10. I was to graduate from high school at 14, from university at 18. But it didn’t happen that way. I discovered a whole new world in lying, a skill I learned early and was able to perfect by the second year of high school. I lied about many things: how I was doing in school (mediocre), the number of friends I had (zilch), and my state of mind (not so happy), among others. That time, the only thing I didn’t lie about was my sexual identity. Of course, nobody knew about it. But I did not pretend.

This would continue until my first two years at university. Stuck in a course that I didn’t like, I couldn’t even pretend to like schoolwork enough to pass. I screwed up my grades and didn’t care. And I became very good at lying. There was a point when I felt that the lies I’d been telling were beginning to catch up with me that there would come a point when my only salvation would be if I died. Or killed myself, whichever happened first. I strongly felt that I wouldn’t live past the age of 16. 

But I did live past the age of 16. Even if a bottle of Malathion sat inside my desk drawer for months. When I finally opened the bottle, the kerosene-like smell put me off drinking it. I mixed it with a glass of orange juice but the juice turned into a milky, neon-orange concoction that made me want to puke just by looking at it. I was even too lazy to kill myself.

I clearly do not remember how I survived my teenage years. In my third year at university (in a new school, which accepted me largely because the school president was a friend of my grandmother), I made friends for the first time in my life as a student. These friends accepted me, warts and all, changing me forever. These friends are still my friends, close enough to be siblings. I did manage to graduate from university at age 19, in the upper 10% of the class (making my parents proud of me after a long period of screwing up). 

And what of lying? Believe it or not, I was weaned from lying partly because also of this laziness that I’d been speaking about. Lying, I decided, was simply too much work. Because when you lie, you have to keep on lying to maintain that first lie. That’s a complete waste of time and energy! Whereas telling the truth is simpler, and easy on the mind. I wish this was a lesson that I had learned earlier; it would have saved me from a lot of grief. But things happened the way they did; I couldn’t change it anymore. I wish a friend of mine now learns this lesson because I see myself in him when I was his age.

I hope. 

When I re-discovered truth, I decided to devote myself to it and strove to tell it all the time. But this devotion almost turned into fanaticism. My adherence to truth made me see things in black and white, ignoring the countless shades of gray in our lives. It took me a while but these days I like to think that I have reached a certain balance. Of course, I value honesty, honesty, and consistency. I take a careful stance on frankness, for I think it’s not the same with honesty. But I am more understanding of the context and the situation under which a truth or a lie is told.

Whether this is a denial of failure, a lover’s indiscretion, or a deception, I think there are stories behind every lie. It doesn’t mean that I will condone it, or that I will go along with it (at least, not all the time, or depending on who’s doing it), but I am now open enough to try and understand it. Still, that lesson about telling the truth is just too precious, too valuable to ignore.