You just found out your boyfriend was cheating on you. Maybe you found out your girlfriend lost your favorite shirt or something and tried to cover it up. Maybe you just find yourself living in a world where you feel like people are always lying to you.
So you stop and ask yourself. Why is everyone lying to me? Do I just have stupid written across my forehead? Am I just paranoid?
Maybe it’s not you.
We live in a society where we are constantly bombarded with perfection. That person you went to school with 10 years ago just went on a vacation to Mexico and had perfect weather every single day (yeah, okay.) Your friend just posted a photo montage of her pregnancy journey and she has not one hair out of place. We’re lied to every. damn. day.
We’re taught that you have to be perfect to post a selfie. We’re taught that if you don’t get a certain amount of likes on your picture, you have to delete it. It just wasn’t good enough, right? So if we have to tweak every image we project out into the world, why wouldn’t we feel like we have to lie to those close to us to keep them “liking” us.
When you sit and think about it, honesty is vulnerability. It’s letting someone see the broken parts of you that you may not even acknowledge sometimes. Being honest is being imperfect, nobody has a history that isn’t affected by something we don’t want people to know about. Honesty is messy and complicated and we don’t want people to think that we come with “baggage”.
I hate that word, baggage. As if someone’s history is a burden to whoever they decide to disclose it with. Think about it. Sometimes, people forget their baggage at the airport, it gets lost, it gets beat up, it’s not perfect. So we forget about it, ignore it, then get mad when someone has a breakdown because they’ve been trying to hide who they really are. Have you ever tried to close a suitcase that’s too full? Eventually, you give up.
And when it all comes out, it ALL comes out. Live your truth. If that means posting a picture of the bags under your eyes because you worked 80 hours in a week, do it. If you live your truth, you never have anything to hide.
A Thousand Words 
Aristotle’s teachings makes honesty into a disposition. A person is honest when they possesses the disposition to face others by making explicit all those details that are relevant to the conversation at issue. Relevance is important, you can keep the bags under your eyes to yourself, but if asked why your assignment was late – just lay it out straight.
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