The Final Year

Why are we taught to tell the truth? Over and over again our parents tell us that the truth is always right, always the answer. This is not only categorically false but often dangerous. When we get old enough to have complex and dynamic relationships with people, we find out very quickly that the truth can do a lot of damage. When I was in eighth grade, I was friends with someone who was beginning to hang out with people in my class that I didn’t get along with (to put it mildly). One day, I happened to hear two of these guys “discussing” my friend in negative terms. It was a strange sensation, because on the one hand I was angry on behalf of my friend, but I was also elated that I might now be able to convince him to stop hanging out with these creeps. I went and told him what they had said about him, thinking he’d be happy to hear how they really felt, and thank me for bringing this to his attention. To my horror, neither of these happened, but instead he began to cry, devastated that his new friends would say such horrible things. It turned out that he was very sensitive about the particular comments they had made about him, and I still to this day wonder if I unwittingly confirmed (in his mind) the very things he always hated about himself. I felt awful, and asked my mom later if I had done the right thing. After all, it was she who always told me to tell the truth no matter what, that if I was at least honest, then nothing bad would happen. “Oh, honey, I don’t think you should have done that. No, you should have kept what they said to yourself.” Crap. My head was spinning, devastated at the havoc I had wreaked in the life of someone I cared about. The next day, the two guys came up to me at school, out of their minds with fury. I thought they were going to kick my ass right then and there, but they just screamed at me, demanding that I explain why I would go rat on them. I mumbled some weak something or other about the truth and honesty, ducked my head and pushed past them.
The Truth. It almost never leads to the good life that our parents preached. “I’m just being honest,” only follows a devastatingly insulting comment. I get so annoyed by people being praised for always speaking their mind. “I like her. She doesn’t pull any punches, that one.” All that means is that the filter that normally keeps insults from spilling out of a person’s mouth is defective. There’s a reason people viscerally react to the idea of someone reading their thoughts. We all think bad things about people we love, but it’s perfectly safe as long as you’re strong enough to keep those thoughts to yourself. As soon as you give voice to those random neural firings, they become relationship-destroying nuclear bombs. No, the truth is an awful, disgusting thing, one that should be shut up in our own minds as often as realistically possible.