The thing about honesty is that it is infinitely more purposeful than we assume it is. Honesty, as a commodity that we can use to purchase expectation and loyalty from those around us, that we can use to prove our dependability... it demands so much.
Transparency, that's one thing. That's easy. Here I am, I exist to answer what you find curiosities about, I can show you tell you make you into exactly my reality. Real transparency doesn't exist- even if we had our entire lives playing out on a movie screen you would have no idea what is actually happening. We don't exist only through actions, we have meaning, purpose, we navigate with strategy. We are driven by emotion, by trauma, by survival. What we do is such a small part of what is actually happening. It's really unattainable to live transparently. Cute thought, though.
But honesty, honesty exists in the place where I am but I tell you as you need my language to be.
Hear me out.
To be honest we must first identify something that will be important to the other to know. Imagine all of the seconds of the day where you interacted, thought, remembered. The millions of moments that can potentially become a worthwhile story... if it ever makes it.
To be honest, the interaction has to have registered. Literally in your brain, you have to have logged it in as more than working memory. Not only do you need to have lived it, but make sure you paid attention.
Not to mention, we have to register event things that may not have mattered at all to us. Honestly necessitates that we use the other's discrimination to encode! This also means, we must know them enough that we are pretty sure we can tell what they will need from us. Then we extricate the information of our own judgement in order to present it in language that the person wants. We give them the information they ask for assuming we understand the specific details that will be important to them. We must masterfully dissect our own lived experience to present it on a silver platter.
This is why dishonesties are so common. How often is information avoided or "wrongfully" presented? We are constantly feeling lied to, humiliated, left out- where are these people who live lives so "honest"? Where did they gain these incredible skills to learn to tell everyone exactly what was important? And how can we teach that? Maybe acknowledging the nuances of honesty is the beginning. Maybe this is where we can start to pull apart what our need are, where our boundaries lie and spend so much more time learning new ways to use language.
