Truth, Honesty, and the Justifiable Lie
“You can tell the truth and still betray yourself. You can be honest and still be wrong. Truth is what happened. Honesty is how it lives in you.”
from a mindful place of unrest
I’ve always been able to justify not telling the truth.
A softened version here.
A convenient omission there.
A full-bodied fabrication, wrapped in charm and delivered with good reason.
It didn’t feel like lying.
It felt like strategy.
Compassion, even.
I could explain it all away.
And I slept fine.
What haunts me now isn’t the fact that I lied—
but how easy it was to make it make sense.
To myself.
There was always a narrative that held it up.
Always a structure of logic, a scaffolding of self-preservation or social diplomacy.
Something that kept the lie in place without the guilt.
That’s the part that scares me now.
Not the dishonesty itself,
but how normal it felt.
How justified.
We live in an age of truth.
Open-source information.
Radical transparency.
Infinite access.
The internet.
AI.
Whistleblowers and deepfakes and search histories that don’t forget.
And still—
we lie.
More than ever, maybe.
We lie with our brands.
We lie in our marketing decks.
We lie on dating apps and in performance reviews.
We lie in public and call it strategy.
We lie in private and call it protection.
But the most insidious lies
aren’t the ones we tell others.
They’re the ones we sell to ourselves.
The ones that help us stay quiet
when we should speak.
Complicit
when we should dissent.
Numb
when we should be wide awake.
There is a difference between truth and honesty.
Truth deals in facts.
Honesty deals in presence.
You can tell the truth and still betray yourself.
You can be honest and still be wrong.
Truth is what happened.
Honesty is how it lives in you.
We’re taught that truth and lies are binary.
Clean. Absolute. Obvious.
But real life isn’t cut and dry—
it’s muddy.
Contradictory.
Tense.
You can lie with facts.
You can tell the truth with silence.
You can be honest and still cause harm.
You can be dishonest and still save a life.
So where’s the line?
Where’s the place where awareness meets integrity
without collapsing into moralism?
Silence can be a lie, too.
We’re taught that lies are spoken.
But silence can manipulate just as powerfully.
The things we don’t say.
The truths we don’t name.
The harm we don’t acknowledge.
Sometimes silence is sacred.
A pause. A breath. A refusal to react.
Other times, it’s complicity.
A cover-up.
A form of gaslighting.
A way of keeping things clean
when they are anything but.
I’ve held my tongue to avoid conflict.
To keep the peace.
To stay “mindful.”
But mindfulness, real mindfulness, doesn’t mean silence.
It means presence.
And presence doesn’t always feel calm.
Sometimes, to be present
is to let the truth rupture everything.
Honesty is not cruelty.
Kindness is not always honest.
This is where things get tangled.
We like to think we’re being kind when we withhold the truth.
But are we protecting them—
or protecting ourselves from their reaction?
When someone asks, “Does this look good?”
and we say, “Yeah, it’s great,”
what are we really doing?
Preserving their confidence?
Or avoiding discomfort?
There’s a line between gentleness and manipulation.
Between kindness and performance.
Between protection and condescension.
And that line isn’t fixed.
It moves with context.
With intention.
With courage.
Sometimes truth cuts deeper than it needs to.
Sometimes a lie keeps a fragile connection intact.
But if we’re honest—truly honest—
we’d admit how often we dress cowardice up as compassion.
The Little White Lie
(an aside that isn’t really an aside)
Here’s the part I wrestle with:
Does it really matter if I lie about the sweater?
If someone I love is wearing something that doesn’t suit them—
and they ask, “How do I look?”
What’s the right thing to say?
Is honesty a virtue in this moment?
Or a weapon?
Is the truth helpful?
Or just a flex of my own taste?
These are the tiny, human spaces where ethics blur.
Where kindness and truth tangle.
Where mindfulness doesn’t give you answers—
only awareness of the stakes.
Because maybe it’s not about whether the sweater is ugly or not.
Maybe it’s about what the question is really asking:
Do you see me? Do you care enough to respond? Can I trust your eyes on me?
Sometimes, saying “You look great”
isn’t about the sweater.
It’s about solidarity.
Connection.
A moment of warmth in a world already cold enough.
Other times, saying “You look great”
feels like betrayal.
Like dishonesty that eats at the fabric of trust.
So we navigate.
We discern.
We feel for the line, moment by moment.
Because the truth is:
I’m not 100% honest.
Not even now.
And I don’t know if anyone is—
or if anyone should be.
But I’m trying to be honest enough
to know when I’m lying.
And why.
That feels like a start.
Mindfulness is not moral clarity.
It doesn’t give you clean answers.
It gives you awareness.
That’s all.
But awareness changes everything.
It doesn’t tell you what to say.
It shows you why you want to say it.
It reveals the motive behind the mask.
The self-deception inside the “good intention.”
The breath doesn’t guarantee truth.
It just makes it harder to pretend you didn’t know.
So the question becomes:
What are you willing to see?
In yourself?
In others?
In the culture you participate in?
Radical honesty has a cost.
But so does its absence.
To tell the truth in a dishonest world
is to risk being misunderstood.
To be labeled difficult.
Harsh. Cynical. Unkind.
Ungrateful.
Sometimes you will lose people.
Opportunities.
Comfort.
Sometimes you will lose the version of yourself
that survived by being agreeable.
But when you withhold truth—again and again—
something else dies.
Your aliveness.
Your resonance.
Your ability to feel what’s real.
To be awake is to feel that ache.
To know when something is off
and not edit yourself to fit back in.
This isn’t about confession culture.
It’s about refusal.
To collude.
To perform.
To spiritually bypass.
This matters now.
More than ever.
We are flooded with spin.
From spiritual leaders.
From social media therapists.
From wellness entrepreneurs selling “authenticity”
in curated fonts and AI captions.
From politicians who lie with their hands on sacred texts.
From influencers who smile while selling shame in disguise.
It’s not new.
But it’s louder now.
It’s not about knowing everything.
It’s about being honest enough
to feel what’s real.
To question the convenient narrative.
To sit in the discomfort
long enough to see what you’d rather avoid.
This is what mindfulness is, at its most radical:
Not serenity, but sincerity.
Not peace, but presence.
Not silence, but awareness.
The truth won’t always feel good.
But the lie will always cost more.
Always remember...Just Breathe!
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