Telling the Truth

When I was a little girl, there was a game show that I loved. Three contestants would stand behind their respective podiums and claim some particularly interesting identity as their own—

snake handler to the stars,

Elvis’s first secretary,

the youngest living survivor of the Titanic—

You get the picture. A celebrity panel would then pepper each of the contestants with inquiries to try and sleuth out who was play-acting and who really did give birth in a lion’s den. Betty White might kick the questions off,

“Contestant number two, please tell me, how did you find yourself on this safari during your third trimester,” and the contestant would launch into an explanation about how it was a tenth anniversary present for her husband, the only available time the whole year, she got doctor’s clearance to go…” and the listeners would nod, taking note of any hesitations, stammers, or coughs, all in search of the most believable offering.  The show was called To Tell the Truth, and I sat rapt through each episode as I practiced discerning the difference between human articulations of fact and fiction.

 Then again, facts and truth are not quite the same thing, are they? Isn’t it a fact that a person can be your biological relation but, in truth, they are, by no meaningful definition, your kin? Isn’t it accurate that many of us have, at one time or another, been technically single but truthfully taken? Even laws are not above reproach in this way. Some, honestly, seem to insist that we lie in word and in deed about the real state of things.  I think often about a quote I saw at the African American History Museum from an enslaved woman about the truth of her partnership:

 “We called it and considered it true marriage, although we knew that marriage was not permitted to the slaves as a sacred right of the loving heart.”

 Supremacy says there is one right way.

Someone is black or white.

Married or single

Believer or unbeliever

Good or bad.

 The “Truth” though, might be more messy, moody, mercurial, than we care to admit.

 I know someone who did a dissertation on hyperbole(swoon). He suggested that, at times, it is an exaggeration (more than objective details) that most acutely captures a reality. And I agree. A fact can only take you so far in this world. If you tell me, you love coffee, I’ll believe you. If you tell me you want to take it intravenously, at the expense of your own dignity and the lives of your children, if need be, I will move beyond belief and into understanding. What you will have given is not accurate in the strictest conception of the term, of course, but in your linguistic liberation, you come closer to communicating the truth of your unbridled un-caffeinated agony.  

Opinion giving and fact-sharing are often disguised as truth-telling in relationships but to the extent that being “honest” is code for being careless with human emotions, needs, and relationships, I am fully disinterested.  “You can be a person without being an asshole,” my father has been known to say, and I tend to think, hope, he is right.  I don’t mean to suggest that it is by any means an easy endeavor for those of us non-deities, but surely, it’s possible if we put our minds to it. This is why I think it’s fine, best even at times, to meet the essence of a moment or question, not with facts and figures and pseudo-virtuosic “telling it like it is”, but rather with reciprocal essence.

 When a child asks me if I think the picture they have drawn is beautiful, the essential inquiry is something more like,

Was this a good thing to have tried?

Am I capable?

Do you love me?

And the answer to those questions is almost always, yes. It isn’t just children who have these wonders about themselves and I think that is important to remember when we find ourselves called to be purveyors of the capital-T-truth.

 There is a time, I realize, for “saying it plain”. When and how to do this has often eluded me, though especially in my most intimate relationships. I wonder aloud all the time, “when is it right and good to bring up an uncomfortable truth in a relationship?”  I suppose it feels to me sometimes like being a jerk or a coward are the only options for expressing a need or desire and I don’t care for either of those identities.

 If, for instance, the first time a friend bails on plans at the last minute, I say to her, “This is unacceptable and I don’t think we can proceed with this relationship” I am not being a mature and boundried woman, I am just being an inflexible weirdo. On the other hand, if I say nothing that first time, and then the friend flakes two more times over the course of, three months, and then I bring it up to them, now I come across as a secret grudge-holder who should have said something earlier instead of keeping a list of credits and demerits.

 I have posed this dilemma a million times at happy hours, in therapy, and thankfully a couple years back at a book club where I got the best answer I’ve ever heard on the topic. “I think, you tell the truth, when you know it to be the truth” a kind woman who I liked from afar but who I didn’t know very well explained. This makes sense to me. If I know that I know that I know that I feel lost and lonely when someone cancels plans at the very last minute, I should tell them that, along with whatever I intend to do to cope with and/or protect myself from such states of unrest, but I can only do that if I have done the work to understand the truth of my lostness and loneliness rather than wearing he façade of rigidity and righteousness.

 That’s what I like about this truth-telling guidance from the woman in my reading group. It centers oneself as the most important understander of a reality. We spend so much of our lives—I spend so much of my life—trying to curate a palatable set of truths about myself to the real and imagined audiences for whom I perform, it is easy to decide that I will bite my tongue in order to stay cool or employed or safe, or loved, but truth, like anger has a way of bubbling to the surface and making itself known one way or another.   

 I finished a book recently called the Enneagram for Black Liberation. It was fantastic. Chichi Agorom does a great job of acknowledging that many of us have developed a personality structure as armor not out of some moral deficit, but in response to a world that has been cruel to us. We were not wrong to have prepared for battle. There was, at times quite literally, a war against us, our bodies and our souls. When you are at war you learn some strategies for existing amidst the cruelty and some of those strategies include lying to and about ourselves.

 I was never in a real-life-war and the truth is that my life has been one that is marked with much privilege, but when I think back on my childhood, I can see now that it was full of internalized oppression. That was my armor. This means I took on the supremacist narrative that claimed that most if not all Black struggle was a function of individual weakness as opposed to structural violence. This was a lie. And while it makes me sick to have had that lie placed on me, living in me, nurtured by me, I can also admit that in some ways it probably served as a shield for me at that time in my development. I needed to believe the lie that life was fair for anyone willing to work hard and live right and I fear if more people had forced the truth on me about the ways the world was set up to be antagonistic, and worse, indifferent to me, I might have given up altogether on labor and on living.

 I’ve always thought I loved that show To Tell the Truth at least in part because I knew it would be helpful to know how to be a good storyteller (read: liar) should the need for such weaponry arise, but maybe another thing that appealed to me was learning to detect untruths from even the most believable, trustworthy, salt of the earth looking people. Maybe I suspected, even then that some people would be lying to me with smiles on their faces, and money in their hands— a reward for their convincing if conniving deceit.

 Telling the truth about the impact of race on my life and in the world has been important for my health and well-being. I’ve made a career of it, one that I am proud to have established. But to be honest, I do not always tell the truth about what life is like for me. The truth, in some circumstances, is overrated. It can be dangerous—misunderstood, misapplied, and misused. It can be elusive. It can be a work in progress. It can be too long and boring and inconsequential to get into. It can be offensive. The truth can also be private. So, the telling of it—the when, the where, the how, the to whom, should be handled with more care than we are sometimes led to believe.

 Still, I try to follow the advice of the wise woman from book club.  I try to tell the truth to myself about myself. It can be unpleasant. I find that I am weaker, needier, more boring, and impatient and sickly and sinful than I had once hoped. But when I put down some of the now unraveled untruths that used to be my daily bread, I find that I am also larger and better,  more interesting and more wonderous than I ever dared to dream.