Honesty

Or, rather, a confession about dishonesty

Dear Friends,

This is my last essay to you in 2022. It’s not particularly deep but it is about change, it’s been a year of big changes and I am very very cautiously optimistic about the new year. I hope if this was a tough year for you, as well, that you still have many small moments of joy and laughter to look back on. I love you, I mean it.

With all the love and thanks I’ve got,

Hannah

Something very strange happened to me over the last six months- I say “happened to me” because it isn’t a change I’ve made intentionally, though it’s (morally speaking, of course) probably a change for the better- without intending to, at all, I’ve stopped being such a fucking liar.

Which isn’t to say that I have not told a lie in the last six months. I have told plenty of lies! Not to you, my girls, but I have lied lots. I tell myself that lying is the nature of any sort of break up or divorce. Not always lying, but avoiding the truth or the whole truth. In my defense, I don’t expect my exes or new partners to always be entirely honest with me, either.

I still avoid the whole truth sometimes, of course. No woman is an army but I am the only person who is unilaterally on my team. The only person whose motivations I really know is me. And so, the only person who can ever know the whole truth is me.

But I used to lie constantly. Rarely about important or big things but consistently to make people feel better, to be less opinionated or to protect myself from judgment. Or just because I was a liar.

“Isn’t my baby cute?” A stranger says. “Yes, he’s the most adorable thing in the world.”

“Is it going to be gross and overcast all week?” A friend, visiting Idaho, would ask.

“I am sure it will be just beautiful the rest of your time here!” I’d reply brightly, having just checked the weather, knowing the clouds won’t lift and that cold, icy rain will join them.

This was my favorite kind of lie, a lie to avoid mentioning an inconvenient truth. Perhaps I missed my calling in politics. It wasn’t optimism. Peacekeeping, rather. I did not want to see anyone’s crestfallen face when I told them bad news. I hate being the barer of bad news! And why tell someone a horrible truth when there’s bright, optimistic dishonesty available?

“You know me, I’m not a liar.” I said to countless friends, before the more outrageous (and true!) parts of a particularly juicy story. Hannah, you’re probably the second biggest liar I know. I’m sure they thought.

My strangest lies- a habit from my childhood, I think, because when I mentioned it to my sister she said she does the same- were completely harmless, avoidant lies for no reason. I would walk into dinner, a few minutes late, and say, “I’m so sorry, I was just finishing up on the phone with Kate.” But I had been on the phone with Parry. None of the friends at dinner had issues with my sister or my best friend.

“Where did you buy this Advil?”

“The bodega” but it was CVS. Completely pointless, meaningless. Impossible to stop once you’ve started.

But what is the harm in these sort of lies? Other than a moral absolutist view that all dishonesty is unethical. (Honestly? I think that sort of opinion is totally ridiculous.) The best answer I have is that they likely wear away at people’s perception of my general reliability and honesty. I would not lie to a friend about something important, like my feelings on an ethical dilemma or about whether a blouse she’s wearing on an exciting second date washes her out. And I think my friends know this— even the stories from my personal life, the ones that most of us don’t share to be polite or avoid embarrassment, I am very open about with my inner circle. And my inner circle is big! Too big! I am very open and trusting and I was also a giant liar. And I am sure that, at some points, all of the small lies made my friends doubt the big truths. Lying constantly, but reasonably harmlessly, is generally a bad habit, of course, and I am sure it comes from some nasty part of my psychology or a trauma that I am too bored of therapy to dissect. But I’ve never really made an effort to change. I considered stopping the lies, many times, to make things simpler and to make me seem less cagey. But I never really tried to stop. Lying was my nature.

And how does a woman change her nature? This woman, I think, just got very very tired. And suddenly the energy to lie was much more than the energy to tell the truth. And so I stopped lying. Without intention, truth started coming out. Occasionally, at first and then nearly all of the time.

“Are you too hot?” A friend asks now.

“Yes, can you please turn on the air conditioning?”

“Do you think Daniel will like this dress?”

“Honestly, it's more of a girl’s dress than a dress to wear to impress a man.” (Occasionally women wish to dress to impress men!)

“Do you miss your ex husband? Your dad? Your mother?”

“Of course. Yes. No.”

“Are you happy?”

“I’m not really sure, I think so.”

“Did you buy this lip gloss at Bergdorf’s?”

“No, at Sephora.”

I think this is better, perhaps a sign of personal growth! Or of aging, which when you think about it, is sort of the same thing. A slightly better person, when I am exhausted.

There’s an old labor and delivery nurses’ joke that when a proud parent shows a nurse a particularly swishy faced, lopsided, almost gruesome infant and says, “Isn’t this just the cutest baby you’ve ever seen?” That the trick is to smile down at little Quasimodo and say, “He looks just like you.” I’ve found an honest, if still- in the tradition of being me- people pleasing alternative, “just look, he has his mother’s beautiful eyes.”

…

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You’re wonderful just as you are,

Hannah