Self-Aggrandizement: the whole truth, part one

the whole truth, part one
Filed Tuesday, April 6 2004.

In a comment on one of last week's posts, I mentioned Brad Blanton's book Radical Honesty, as it has profoundly impacted the way I've approach my life since I first read it around Thanksgiving. Prior to that point, I was full of shit. And I was very, very good at it. Years of high school and college and running several companies taught me to lie through my teeth smoothly and with great aplomb. It worked very well. It got me through high school and college and running several companies. But the problem was, the more I did it, the less I was conscious of doing it. Soon, the bullshit of work spilled over into bullshit with friends and family, and eventually into bullshit with myself. I was feeding myself a pitch 24 hours a day, seven days a week, convincing myself that all the bullshit I was feeding everyone was actually the truth. And I was almost buying it, except that I knew the asshole doing the pitching.

I stumbled across Radical Honesty right when I needed it most, when the towers of bullshit I had built were threatening collapse. The premise of the book is simple: we all lie like hell, and maintaining those lies is the main source of stress in our lives. Shed the lies and the work of keeping them hidden, and you'll not only feel more alive and more creative but find your relationships are vastly richer as well. Blanton divides telling the truth into three successive levels: revealing the facts, honesty about current thoughts and feelings, and exposing the fiction. Let's take them sequentially.

Level One: Revealing the Facts

Here, the eloquent Blanton discusses withholding the truth because it seems more effective and politic to do so:

You are 'politic' in this way when you imagine yourself a good person because you don't tell your wife about jacking off while thinking about her sister, or don't tell your boss about your secret plans, or don't tell your mouther you pissed in the chicken soup when you were 12. This is being so lost in illusion you can't possible ever reach adulthood. Tell your wife the truth about your fantasies about everyone else, including her sister (and all those animals and things, too); tell your boss about your plans, your mistakes, and all that marijuana you smoked; and for God's sake, tell your mother about the soup. If the truth is told, you'll feel relieved, because you have been anxious in some vague way for so long you forgot where it came from, but kept it up anyway, because you knew something bad was about to happen but just couldn't remember what it was. Anxiety is what accompanies fantasy crashes and near collisions.

This level is both remarkably hard and remarkably easy. To reach it, you figure out the stupid shit you've done, you tell the relevant people about it, they get remarkably pissed of for about twenty minutes and then put it behind them, and you somehow feel vaguely disappointed that your revelation didn't lead things to collapse into a pyre of hellfire as you always suspected they might if your secret got out.

The main thing is to simply own up to all the facts, to stop hiding them from not only the people immediately involved, but from everyone, everywhere. I can now comfortably admit things people never knew, like "I cheated on a programming assignment my freshman year at Yale" or "the sale of both Sharkbyte and Powerdime.com made almost no money at all for anyone involved". Honestly, nobody really gives a shit about either of these revelations, but I was using all kinds of mental energy to carry them around quietly inside as if people did.

Level Two: Honesty about Current Thoughts and Feelings

Now let's take it up a notch: whatever you're thinking and feeling, spit it out, even if you're conviced you'd be better off if you didn’t. This is a bit rough to accept logically. I hear you ask, "so, if she says to me, 'does my butt look big in this dress?', Blanton really expect me to say, 'yes, it does'?" In fact, that's exactly what he expects. He also expects you to tell other people when they piss you off, or make you happy, or whatever else. This may not seem an immediately expedient way to live life, but I've found that being able to interact with others based on what you really think and feel leaves you vastly freer to actually relate to the other person, rather than forcing you to spend all your time constructing a mask that you think will manipulate them into causing the results you want.

"But," I hear you ask, "won't people get upset when you just say what you think?" Well, yes. At the Christmas party of a friend (who's likely reading along here), I observed that one attractive female in attendance seemed to be dumb as nails. This, obviously, didn't go over well with my party-hosting friend, and she said as much, rather angrily, the next time we got together. After she shared the truth about her feelings, she felt better as well, and that was pretty much it. People getting angry isn't nearly as bad as we assume it's going to be; no matter how riled up they become, if you just encourage them to lay it on you, usually they'll have said everything they have to say in about fifteen, twenty minutes, and then you can go back to laughing together. This is vastly, vastly preferable to you or them carrying around that unvoiced anger, which lasts for years and decades, tainting the relationship and slowly festering into secret hatred.

Level Three: Exposing the Fiction

This is the final piece. This is where you say, "the person I am, and the person I carefully construct and sell to the world (and to my real self), are not the same thing." This is the process of demythologizing yourself, which starts by bragging about all the things you did which, in your false modesty, you were pretending not to care about, then by feeling embarassed about the bragging, and then by realizng that the bragging and being embarassed are just bullshit as well. In this step, you admit that what you have been selling other people on, and selling yourself on, is not who you actually are. In fact, you don't really know who you are. Which is why you developed the act in the first place: you didn’t want to look lost and hoped you'd find your way by faking it. This shift is all about moving from trying to look smart to admitting you don't know a goddamn thing.

There's something remarkably enjoyable about this step. Book publishing? I don't have a clue in the world what I'm doing there. But I'm scrambling as fast as I can to figure it out. Saying so is so vastly easier than feigning expertise that I don't know why I didn't start admitting my ignorance earlier. This third level is, as far as I can tell, neverending. You start feeling pleased with yourself because you're telling the whole truth, then realize that being 'the guy who always tells the truth' is as much bullshit as anything else, and you're back to ground zero.

Still, I'm finding it's absolutely worth it. Each step on the path to radical honesty, to telling the whole truth, to being the whole truth, makes me feel lighter and freer. I'd recommend you try it out yourself.

the whole truth, part one Filed Tuesday, April 6 2004.

the whole truth, part one
Filed Tuesday, April 6 2004.