How Not to Be a Hot Mess - A Survival Guide for Modern Life - Craig Hase Page 0,24

me.

To be sure, I rarely tell outright lies at this point. But, still, I notice myself bending facts a little here, trimming the truth just a bit over there. And, man, I tell you, when it comes to exaggeration, I just can’t seem to get a handle on my mouth.

Like, if the fish was ten inches, I’ll say it was twelve (not that I fish, but you get the picture). Or if the traffic was backed up three miles, I’ll say it was four. And if I’m telling a story about someone I admire, their good qualities become larger than life.

I’m told this tendency toward hyperbole is because I’m a Sagittarius, and so I just can’t help myself. Everything is larger than life for me. I don’t know anything about astrology, but I can tell you it’s a little embarrassing when my wife, or my brother Mark, or someone who knows me well, looks at me sideways and says, “Really? The traffic was backed up four miles?” And then I have to think it through and realize, no, it was more like three miles. Okay, two and a half, but it felt like forever.

At any rate, exaggeration is a kind of lying, and as I’ve held this thought of say what’s true for myself over the years, I’ve noticed more and more how even this seemingly little excursion from the facts carries with it a slight loss in trust, a tiny little break in communication. And so I try to watch myself and say what’s truly true so I can have the kinds of intimate relationships I want and live a life I feel mostly really good about.

Okay. So. Lying. Is. Bad. Don’t do it. Or at least try not to do it. Now you’re just going to walk around telling the absolute truth all the time to everyone you meet, friend or stranger, bus driver or boss, right? Well, here’s a caveat.

SAY WHAT’S TRUE (BUT NOT ALWAYS)

Now I will admit something embarrassing. For years—and I mean years—I suffered from the inexpedient assumption that I should really tell people what was on my mind. No matter whether it was good or bad, friendly or unfriendly, or just plain irrelevant. Where did I get this ridiculous idea?

Well, there have been a series of psychotherapies and philosophies, most of them rooted in some bad Freudian provocations, many of them finding their greatest reach and impact in the 1960s and ’70s, which stated, more or less: speak your mind. These systems of conduct valued authenticity above all. They derided society’s scripted interactions. They sought to liberate their followers from the oppression of everyday propriety and release them into a realm of personal, sexual, and relational candor, an ever-expanding adventure of self-expression and life-as-art joy.

Or that was the idea. What actually happened, at least for me, was I ended up telling people a bunch of nonsense that was in my head, free of the context of those experimental social movements, and ended up in all manner of trouble. I could list about a hundred times when I did this, each more knuckleheaded than the last. But let me just give you a quick and easy (and fairly minor) example.

Last year, Devon and I celebrated our wedding anniversary. It happened to be right before we were making a big move to Hawai’i so I could do my clinical work and finally finish my PhD. It also happened to coincide with an absolute apex of the migrant detainment epidemic at the Mexican-American border, with daily news reports of children locked in cages and families broken up and reprocessed and sometimes never finding their way back to each other. So when my dear mother bought us an anniversary gift—a beautiful, though breakable, vase—I said to her, “Hey, how about we return this vase that we can’t really take with us to Hawai’i and donate the proceeds to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), since they’re doing such good legal work at the border.”

Now, my dear mother had just gone through a breakup with her longtime boyfriend (don’t worry, they got back together) and also just retired and also just moved, and she was in no mood to be told that the lovely vase she’d bought us could not be transported to Hawai’i and that, anyway, wouldn’t it be better to put all that money toward do-gooding? So she kind of got pissed. And I apologized. And she said, “You know, sometimes it’s