“Honesty” is Dishonest

Annika Fisher-Eddy (she/they)

Editorial Team Member

You’re not always supposed to be honest. Sometimes someone will ask you something, and they expect you to lie in your response. And if you’re honest, they get mad. Sometimes if you’re thinking something, it’s not socially appropriate to say it out loud. Sometimes it’s hard to know what you can say and what you can’t. It’s often really hard to draw that line. Sometimes it’s virtually impossible to know what you can say to someone and what you can't. Some people may take something a different way than the way you mean.

I’ve never agreed with the saying, “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” I’ve always done things and dealt with situations having that phrase in mind. But sometimes treating someone the way you want to be treated in the same situation just causes more problems. They might want to be treated a different way than you do. You might be okay with being treated a certain way, and someone else may not want to be treated that way. I have always been a very open-minded person, and I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, sometimes more than I should. This causes me to not be upset about situations that I should be upset about.  Because of this, I often say or do something to someone else that unintentionally makes them upset, and it’s something that wouldn’t make me upset if someone did the same to me.

I’ve always been an extremely honest person, my whole life. I’ve always been horrible at lying. Even when I do break a rule without telling anyone, if someone asks me if I broke the rule, I can’t bring myself to lie about it. But sometimes it’s annoying to always have to be honest. It means that I get in trouble more easily when I do something I’m not supposed to, because I often come clean about what I did. 

I’m a bit worried about my future because of how honest I am. I even used to compulsively confess every tiny bad thing I did. I tend to be quite an impulsive person, and act on my impulses without thinking about the consequences of my actions beforehand. That’s why I often tell people the truth without thinking, when they might not want to know the truth. I’m worried that one day I’m going to impulsively do something really stupid that could get me in severe legal trouble. I’m worried that I’m going to compulsively confess to my actions, and I will cause myself to end up in jail when I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t snitched on myself.

A less extreme version of this has been happening to me so often recently. It has ruined my relationships with people, because without thinking I’ll impulsively say something that makes them upset, and it makes them think I’m rude or mean. In reality, I was just trying to be honest. But sometimes they get mad because they don’t actually want the truth. I always want the truth from people. Even if I know the truth might hurt my feelings or make me upset, I would rather know the truth than for them to be dishonest. I don’t know why some people don’t want that kind of honesty.