National Honesty Day... Yeah, That's the Ticket

Tomorrow is National Honesty Day. I was generally unaware of what National Honesty Day was, and I found it by randomly clicking around one day while I was “writing this blog” and got stuck on what to write. While searching around for Wonder Years Trivia (because life would be better if we could have Daniel Stern narrating the important moments of our lives) I stumbled upon National Honesty Day.

    NHD (Because while I like to drive up my word count, I don’t want to keep typing “National Honesty Day.”) was created in 1990 to either highlight the way we tell lies in our lives, or by a writer to sell more books. Because I’m not going to go all cynical, I’m going to hope for the first one. (although I’ll be honest with you, the stretch between Easter and Mother’s Day is a long one for Hallmark. NHD would be the perfect way to bridge that gap, and it would be a great way to sell their “I’m seeing someone else” cards, which should be doing better the day after Valentine’s Day.)

    I bring up NHD not because I’m a habitual liar (although if you ask me, you’ll never look fat in those pants) but because too often we lie to ourselves. We lie every day. We tell little lies to get out of work, to try to get out of that speeding ticket, or to government that we are not building a robot army, those are just spare parts. As detrimental as those lies can be to others and our relationships, it’s the little lies we tell to ourselves that can really hurt us. And I’m not trying to get you out of telling the truth in your daily life. But while honesty can be the best policy sometimes, sometimes it’s unnecessary. And today’s post is about looking inward, damnit. You have to read the deep, meaningful ones to get to the funny ones!

    Too often, we find comfort in those little lies we tell ourselves, or the really big one. The really big lie that we tell ourselves too often tend to be “I’m Happy.” We look at ourselves and we say, “I’m happy with the way things are” then we go back to whatever it is we’re doing that is in actuality, making us remarkably unhappy. I know. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. Putting myself into situations where I lie to myself and wish myself happy. When in reality, I’m just convincing myself that things are going fine.

    Which is why I’m going to take this opportunity to embrace the idea of honesty day. Not to the extreme. I know there’s a radical honesty movement out there, and I think too often people just use that as excuse to be jerks. But I think we can take this opportunity to embrace tomorrow a bit. We can take this opportunity to sort of say, “Hey... there’s something I’m not being honest about...” and then change it. Stop lying to ourselves.

    I’m issuing this challenge to Bad Shakespeare readers: be honest tomorrow, about something that you previously had not been honest about before. And I don’t mean, “It was me. I was the one who cancelled Star Trek.” or “I totally didn’t steal that last line from an episode of the Simpsons.” I mean something that will change your life, and either correct it in a fundamental way, or something that will spin it into a new direction. Admit to yourself that something is wrong, and then do something to change it.