Every night, on perfect white pieces of paper, I write my heart out. Nothing held back…pure emotion. Ink splashes all over the page. If there was ever a moment to see what I truly am, all of me and down to the core, its in these pages. The writing morphs and changes on the page. With the emotions comes different sizes, different attentions to detail, pure truth. The cursive on the page never lies, it tells me where I am, where I have been, and who I want to be all at the same time. It never fails me. It is my unbreakable mirror…never showing signs of wear or cracking. Today is about the truth.
The world needs better men.
Surrounding us are men who lie, who cheat on everything and anything, who play games, who try to be people they aren’t. I never was a bad man, but I was hardly a good one a long time ago. But most of all, despite all of the things that people do today to harm others or harm themselves, they hurt the world by lying to themselves every day. The truth, no matter how hard it is to accept, is what matters. It matters to the people around you, the people you love, your teachers, and yourself. I have to be honest with myself right now.
Where am I at? Am I accomplishing what I said I would? Weekends are difficult for me because there’s a lot of down time in comparison to the week. If there is one thing I stand for besides never quitting, its telling the truth about everything. I can’t lie to people. It tears me apart. What I have found living in this world that we all are a part of, is that there are so many opportunities to lie about things. Whether its lying about where you are so you dont have to hangout with someone, lying to professors, or lying to the people you love and care about because you dont want to hurt their feelings. Theres too much lying. No one in my life is not telling me the truth right now, just to clarify that, but I am just reflecting on a harsh reality. I have been lied to before, right to my face, and it is the worst thing ever. You feel betrayed, you feel hurt, you feel burnt. Not telling someone something too is essentially just as bad as lying.
White lies are just as bad as full blown lies. We all tell white lies to try to cover ourselves from shrapnel that could fly if a situation goes south. We tell lies to get ourselves out of confrontations, out of bad situations, out of our responsibilities. Our society is full of addicted liars. Look at our celebrities and politicians. Its just a fact. Here’s the reason I have come to as to why this is the case. And it goes back to something I wrote about a long time ago.
Accountability.
We lie because it is our way out of being accountable for what we have done. Perfect example would be lying to your best friend and saying you can’t do something tonight because you have too much work. The real reason you can’t hangout is because you want to hangout with someone else. Now there is nothing wrong with hanging out with someone else, but for me, once I have committed to something I am 100% in. I can make time for the other person. I also realize that my best friends are my best friends for a reason. I would never lie to Dev in a million years. Me and him have been through a lot together, and we will be there for each other forever. I always joke with him about the speech I am going to make on his wedding day, because I have unlimited amounts of material to work with. I fear the speech he will make about me too haha.
I challenge myself every day to stay accountable to the things I believe in, but more importantly being honest with myself. I have been on this path for a while now, and there have been moments of happiness, sadness, mountain mike “lets go explore” syndrome, and everything else. But instead of pushing away the way I feel about things at the moment, I just let it happen. I let the emotions flow through me like a filter. I know, and I know this for a fact, that if I push down those feelings and not talk about them, I explode later. I can show you vouchers. I think we owe it to ourselves to be honest. This life we have, is the only one we have. And too many people spend it lying about something. I know this is a pretty brutal post, but honestly look deep within yourself and see how much you do lie on a day to day basis. Its kind of scary. I did it a few weeks ago, and it was pretty amazing. I mean, they weren’t huge lies or anything on the lie scale, but still, in the tiniest of lies, we let ourselves down.
We owe it to the people who we love and care about to tell them the truth. If you have screwed up in the past, you owe it to them to apologize and let them know your sorry. Just the other day I made amends with someone who I used to be very close with and it fell apart for reasons that are not important here. What is important is that I made that effort to be honest and let them know exactly what I did and how I was going to fix it. And in that moment of pure honesty, I was forgiven. We all know someone in our lives that we have a bad situation with or who we have ended on bad terms with. They were your friend for a reason, fix it, make it up to them, and dont let yourself down by pushing it away a day further. Take action, do it now.
We owe it to ourselves to be better. We can be better. If we have promised ourselves to do something, we must start now. Each day we push our promises away from us, is a week of struggle to get back to where we started. The world needs better men, but as it stands right now, I know some pretty good ones around me.
So try as hard as you can to be honest with people. Even if it hurts, they will respect you in the end for being honest with them in a sea of lies. We are all better than this. Lets show it.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project