To be honest with you, I’d much rather be watching the entirety of Kath and Kim for the second time this year (it’s only February) as opposed to sitting down for the tenth time to mull over what it means to be better than just nice. I mean, I don’t want to toot my own horn or anything, but it turns out I was right in saying this whole being a fucking good cake business tastes like stale vegemite sandwiches. After a couple of weeks’ worth of reflection and introspection (because I’m so *lisp* spiritual), I’ve done a lot of overthinking on honesty, and proved to myself that it isn’t as pretty as the dipshits who write poetry would make it out to be (ahem, me, I’m the dipshits). Being honest really is messy, it feels uncomfortable, and it sounds a lot like lengthy whinges to my housemate and wussy mutters as I try to spit out the being honest bits to myself or whoever else needs to hear it.
In short, figuring out how to be properly honest is really hard (and writing about it is pretty hard too).
Just to backtrack for a sec, last month we talked about how nice it is to be nice. We also talked about how being nice is a bit useless. To make it our life’s mission statement is honestly just a cop out from living with true chunk and hutzpah. I mean, I understand why we choose to just be nice, it can feel lovely; but I also think that we choose nice for ourselves because to live with stronger life values means we’ve got to get off our mental butts and figure out what it is we actually want to live for. That is really, really hard. It’s so much easier to just go with whatever will float you day by day; but, like I said, I’m not down for just being nice right now. And so I’ve done some groundwork and have kind of figured out that in order to be authentic and sincere with both yourself and with others you’ve got to be gutsy enough to face your own honest wants and needs.
In the words of Kath Day-Knight, “you need to get out and go inside yourself to search your chasms for meanings”.
The more I’ve decided to be honest with myself in searching those chasms for meanings, wants and needs, and then asserting them into my reality, the more I’ve felt the hollowing of my chest cavity like somebody’s been intensely excavating my insides and chucking them out for nobody to pick up and only for me to leave behind. Learning how to be honest begins with completely restructuring your heart to get rid of all of the gunk that used to serve you, and then being attentive enough to the emptied space to see what truly calls back. That’s the poetic way of putting it. What I basically mean is that you’ve got to take the time to de-bullshit your priorities (people and things), and then shut the fuck up so you can actually figure out what feels or is logically right for you. If you sit still for long enough (times vary from person to person), I’m 95% certain you’re bound to hear your own answers.
In doing that for ourselves we also have to deal with tricky things like the fact that our wants and needs are not going to align with the expectations of others; that in doing so may mean we need to let go of people and things (even the ones we love); and, scarier still, that in realising our wants and needs we often times need to let go of certain parts of ourselves. That last point is particularly terrifying, because if you’ve been harboring your wants and needs behind a thick wall of nice, the thought of unleashing them feels like letting go of a perfectly curated image you think to be true of yourself and just hoping you don’t cave in and around all of this freshly cleared out space inside.
Oh man, do I feel all of that.
Again, this is all very hard and scary and extremely boring to have to tend to. But I’m about a month and 700 words into the philosophy now, and I’ve convinced myself that if we really want to be honest with ourselves and with others, these foundations are fundamental. You can’t be honest or upfront with anyone if you don’t know what you want and need; and to go about any kind of relationship or situation without at least trying to sort that shit out for yourself is how you end up fucking people around (just don’t do that, okay? It’s rubbish.) Add a touch of lack of assertion and you’re well on your way to being the worst cake ever (even if your frosting is icy and your sprinkles alluring).
Figuring these things out for ourselves, and making the decisions to act on those realisations, is as painful as having your heart broken; but I feel like if we’re going to live life with chunk and hutzpah we’ve got to do those cognitive hard yards. You’ve got to be brave enough to let certain things go, roll with all of the different kinds of change, and let the processes break you while you’re at it. Because, the thing is, once we’ve given into the difficult feelings that come with figuring out all of what it means to be honest – soon enough it doesn’t hurt so much. And as soon as it doesn’t hurt so much, our bodies grace us with the feelings of elation and peace. It’s like our bodies are saying to us, “oh, you silly duffer. See? You did fine... Now, go out there and do the honest thing again.”
I know, right? You have to be honest again. And again. And then again after that. It never stops. Because the thing about honesty is that it’s this transient value that moves with our age, where we live, with our health, what we do, who we love; and the ways in which we exist with all of those things changes so dramatically from one moment to the next. To be honest for any one person is never going to mean the same thing for very long. We people weren’t designed to be stagnant, and to nurture our innate ability to be honest means we don’t have to end up like stale vegemite sandwiches ourselves. There's so much behind being honest, and I’m certain that to live that way is so much heartier than just being nice.
And, look, I’m going to have to tack a disclaimer to the end of every blog post just to say I’m not very good at whatever I’m writing about; because I'm not very good at whatever I'm writing about. I struggle with being honest like I struggle with being caught up in being nice. But that’s okay, I’m figuring things out, I want to get better, and these hearty values sure do give me some meaty content to think about. To follow on from being honest, I think I’ll write about being assertive next month. No, wait. Next month, I’m going to write about being assertive (better).
Until March,
Meg x
Date: 16th February 2020
Credits:
My Housemate (for listening to me whinge)
My Aunty (for introducing me to Cheryl Strayed)
Cheryl Strayed (for the quote, “be brave enough to break your own heart”)
Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
Everyone I’ve had to be honest to
Kath and Kim (duh)