The thing about honesty

The truth will set you free and other notes

Recently I heard the writing advice: the only thing that matters is that you’re honest about it.

It revealed how honesty is often at the centre of everything. We laugh when someone says an honest thing that catches us by surprise. We connect when people are open about their inner life. We build trust when someone admits to a mistake or says they don’t know.

But it also revealed another question: Who is our honesty for? 

As an example, I haven’t known what to write about for the last week or so. There is a long list of ideas and notes I could refer to, but instead I’ve been caught up in numbers—this many months on Substack, this many subscribers, this many likes, comments and restacks. As a rule, I try to ignore numbers and focus on keeping my promise myself to “write in the gush, the throb, the flood of the moment…without waiting for a fit time or place,” as Walt Whitman put it. And yet, in this moment there is no gush. There is barely a trickle. 

Who stands to gain through my being hones…