Even though sometimes it’s harder to tell the truth instead of hiding behind a lie, I wish more people would do it a lot more often.
The truth is, I’m sure, that a lot of people on campus think I’m talking about a certain story that ran in the Courier-Journal’s Indiana section on Wednesday, Sept 3, but I’m not.
What I’m talking about is simply telling the truth.
The truth is I try to always tell the truth because I’ve told my share of lies in my lifetime, and when I did that I was miserable.
I was caught in a web of lies that I couldn’t find my way out of and it ruined a lot of things for me. I lost friends, girlfriends and more than anything I lost the respect of a lot of people.
That’s when I decided that it was time to face the facts, stop lying and tell the truth.
It was hard and I lost a few more friends because of it, but I can honestly say I’m a better person for trying to tell the truth than I ever could have been living a lie.
The truth is I’m not perfect. I don’t study enough, I spend way too much time online and I enjoy causing trouble a little too much.
In reality, when you lie or try to cover something up it always comes back sooner or later to bite you.
No matter how much power you have or who you know that is willing to cover for you, in the end, the truth always seems to come out.
In my experience, it’s always a lot worse to have to deal with being caught in a lie than it would have been to just face the truth when it happened in the first place.
In most of those situations, I’ve tried to cover up one lie with another and another and still another. Before I know it, I don’t even know what it was that I was lying about in the first place.
I had a friend recently talk to me about a mistake he made during the summer, and he told me all the problems that it caused because he lied about something.
In the end, I told him that I understood, and at some point in my life I had made most of the same mistakes as he had.
The truth is I made those same mistakes, well not exactly but pretty close, and I did understand what he was going through. I’m just sorry we didn’t have that talk sooner and maybe I could have helped him avoid dealing with the same things I did before.
Like I said, I’m far from perfect. I’ve told plenty of lies in my life, and I suffered for most of them one way or another.
The truth is I just got tired of running from my lies.
The lies wore me out, and I just couldn’t run anymore.
That doesn’t make me a better person than someone who has told a few lies. It just makes me a person who got tired of running.
All I’m trying to say is we all make mistakes. Don’t make them worse by lying about them and trying to cover them up because sooner or later the truth will come out.
It always comes out.
By SCOTT GILLESPIE
Editor
tsgilles@ius.edu