There’s something about hypocrisy that really bugs me. Just the whole idea of “do as I say, not as I do,” is something that can make the little vein under my eye start twitching. Therefore, I’m not big on holding people to a standard that I can’t even hold for myself; and honestly, I don’t want much from people. Just honesty.
Growing up I would hide so many of my past struggles and emotional scars and felt like I was constantly drowning. Wanting to lift my head up to get some air, but knew that that would leave me exposed, cold, and there would be no guarantee that there would be a lifeboat there waiting to rescue me. So, I kept my head underwater (metaphorically speaking). But one day, I couldn’t stand it anymore. My emotional lungs throbbed and screamed for fresh air, and I knew that if I didn’t take a deep breath soon, I wasn’t going to survive the way that I was living.
So I did it. With my middle school boyfriend, I revealed everything about me. The things that hurt, that I was ashamed of, the things that I prayed wouldn’t be accompanied with questions because, how could I explain it to him when it was my first time explaining it to myself. I felt free, happy, and knew that no matter what, I was going to cherish the moment when I finally exposed my truth. That was until this same boyfriend, after we “broke up” (we took those childish relationships so seriously, didn’t we?), told everyone in his class everything that I told him. Feeling exposed, I wanted to sink under the lockers, or start my own underground dwellers community. All the questions of: “Is this true?!” accompanied with the “Well, that’s what Tre’ said!”
Luckily, it happened during my last week of school. I graduated a few days after, so I didn’t endure it for too long. But those days were so torturous and I remember contemplating exposing his dirt, but my morals wouldn’t allow me to, because even though he hurt me, I didn’t want to hurt him.
I realized that the reason why it hurt so much was because people were using my truth against me, so I decided to fight fire with fire. If you wanted to know Kendra, you were going to know everything short of my Social Security Number. I didn’t want anything to ever be held over me as a way of holding me in to anyone, because, frankly, I’d done it to myself for years. You had questions about me, all you had to do was go to the source.
I became so free with doing it that usually within the first few lines of communicating with someone for the first time, if you seemed like someone that I could trust, you were someone who could know all about me.
A few years later, I started to really think back on this and realized that this was just as dangerous as well. At any time there was the fear that some ex in my life could pop back in, and expose a grenade that I gave him.
Now, I’m still an advocate of being one hundred percent truthful, but I have to be honest, everyone doesn’t deserve the privilege of getting to know “Kendra” as a whole. I still don’t lie, but I recognize that trust is a byproduct of transparency, and only you can determine how trust determines how much of yourself you would like to expose. Know that are a great person, and whoever gets to know you, the real you, is an extremely lucky person. Expose wisely.
