Honesty should be black and white, right? You're either honest, or you're not. It's a virtue, a quality, a characteristic, a myth... The truth is that honesty is swirls of gray.
Honesty is like a pane of glass, or a window. It lets you
see through to the other side, to the reality and truth. But sometimes it’s
distorted or smudged or cracked. What then? You can still see through to the
general outline, get an idea of the full picture, but you can’t make out the
crisp details or the complete story.
But what’s more important anyway: the nitty, gritty cold facts,
or the way you feel about them? When recalling memory, should we be honest to
the events or to our emotions? And what is more honest anyway? What is more
real? Our reality is made up of our experiences—our understanding of how
things were, are, will be. Honesty is personal to each of us, and we therefore
all have our own versions of the honest truth. So how, then, can there be any
universal truth? Ah, but truth and honesty are two different things, aren’t
they.
Maybe honesty is what comes from us naturally, unavoidably.
How can we live a dishonest life? Our very being is the honesty of our self.
Every breath begins honestly. But we twist things to please ourselves, and in
the process turn them into lies. Honesty is easy, even if blurry at times. But
through the blur, honesty should be ever present.
This was an exercise for my Nonfiction Workshop on Memoir: Simply write "On" at the top of your paper, then add an abstract noun. As I've worked on exercises throughout the semester, it was nice to remember that the word essay (as in a personal essay) comes from the French verb essayer, which means "to try."
This was an exercise for my Nonfiction Workshop on Memoir: Simply write "On" at the top of your paper, then add an abstract noun. As I've worked on exercises throughout the semester, it was nice to remember that the word essay (as in a personal essay) comes from the French verb essayer, which means "to try."
