A white lie is about as common as seeing a McDonald’s restaurant at least once on your way to work -- it’s impossible to avoid. Lying has become a second skin and a sixth sense. Humans have learned to use the practice of lying to become better manipulators, become more successful, and become seemingly superior. Needless to say, lying is a habitual exercise that we need to embody in order to live our lives. It’s almost like coffee: one cup a month turns into one cup a week, and pretty soon you find yourself four cups in by noon every day. Lying has become the snowball that ceases to stop growing.
When we think of lies, we probably picture lying to someone else. Telling your best friend that her hair looks fine, faking having to go to work to avoid getting together with an annoying acquaintance -- these lies slip out of our mouths faster than we can tweet about our morning.
But what about the other kinds of lies? What about the lies that we tell ourselves? These are the lies that tell us we are all right when we aren’t. These are the lies that tell us we can handle taking on more responsibilities in our extracurricular activities. These are the lies that tell us we can fake having it all together because no one will ever guess that we are struggling.
I had the privilege of attending a speech by leadership expert and professional speaker James T. Robilotta entitled “Leading Imperfectly.” Robilotta established a reference to an acronym he created to embody his leadership values, but two values stuck out to me in particular. He talked about how he valued the words “own” and “real.” Robilotta maintained that one could not be real until he or she owned who they were. This, he stated, involved ceasing the inner monologue of lies a person has running through their head.
This got me thinking: what if we stopped lying to ourselves and faced what we fear about who we are? What if I woke up in the morning and told myself “Yes, you have social anxiety. Yes, you will probably avoid doing something today that involves talking to people, but this doesn’t make you less of a person.” We need to understand a different caliber of reality. With the interference of social media and popular culture, no one really knows what reality is. And if they do, it seems too far away and intangible to ever be real.
Moral of the story? Embrace reality for what it actually is. Embrace your quirks. Embrace the things that you don’t like about yourself or think other people won’t like you for. Stop lying to yourself. No one is ever OK all of the time. Refusing to sugarcoat this fact allows normalcy, and in Robilotta’s wisdom, allows you to finally live a lighter life. Plus, we all know you’re faking it anyway, so you might as well join the ranks of the rest and accept the fact that you snort when you laugh or have an obsession with show tunes. Is it weird? Probably. Will you feel better if you embrace it whether than lie to yourself? Absolutely.
