101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

thing in our 
CULTURE IS 
RADICAL HONESTY, 
and that’s exactly
THE PROBLEM
We are being suffocated by a culture—and a people—that, out of an
irreverence for honesty, has grown an inability to coexist.
We call opinions that aren’t immediately harmonious with ours
“offensive” and use that word to make it wrong to see or hear them.
(Not to mention, we’re more “offended” by a woman’s nipple and a
swear word than we are half of the global atrocities of famine and
war and the destruction of the environment.) We police people into
only saying and doing things that make sense to us. We grew up in a
culture that taught us to put ourselves last, even when “putting other
people first” is fake and disingenuous and rooted in resentment and
dishonesty. We are all dying of some untouched, unrealized internal
loneliness, grasping onto the bits of writing and music that speak in
the way we otherwise cannot. We’re suffering from anxiety and
depression and loneliness and uncertainty and fear and failure
mostly because we have to continue to paint an outward picture of
the opposite. The inability to realize those natural, crucial parts of life
are what make them “bad.” Nobody is honest and so nobody is
finding anybody who loves them for them, because they aren’t being
who they are. There are only finding people who love their shells,
which, as we all know, easily break.
So many of our relationships hinge on whether or not we
continually fulfill a set of expectations that we often know about but
sometimes do not. Our fear of honesty and change is rooted in no
longer being acceptable or wanted or held in high regard by the
people who claim to love us.

---

We associate “doing what we want” and “putting ourselves first”
with being selfish and with not considering others. We’re taught that
what we should want is what makes others happy. But do you want
people in your life who secretly don’t want to be there? Is it really
surprising that we’re all lost and scrambling and disconnected from
ourselves when we’re taught not to follow our instincts and truths for
the sake of someone else’s ego? (No.)
It’s not “mean” to tell the truth; we’re just not used to hearing
anything other than what we want to hear. We’ve chalked anything
that isn’t coddling and placating and aligned with our most delusional
and comforting thoughts to be “wrong.” “Truthfulness” and
“meanness” have become synonymous because so long as people
aren’t doing and saying what we want to see and hear, they’re
wrong, and they’re hurting our feelings by, subconsciously or not,
making us feel unaccepted, unwanted, and invalidated (because
we’re only finding those things externally).
What you have to keep in mind is that the people who shout the
loudest about needing to behave a certain way are, undoubtedly, the
very people who have most deeply and profoundly had their lives
shaped by doing what other people wanted. They listened to the
people who shouted loudly at them, and for that, they got emptiness.
The very emptiness that their words are echoing through and out of.
At our core, there is only light. I guarantee there is not one person
you wouldn’t love if you knew their true story, their whole story, if you
lived a day or a year or a lifetime in their shoes. We can’t expect
equality when we’re holding up façades of inequality through
dishonesty. How can we expect people to treat all others as equals if
they’re constantly feeling beneath someone else?
The root of equality, and understanding equality of the human
condition, is being honest about it.
The only way to change the course of our society, to enlighten the
closed minds, to shift the way we perceive gender and race and
humanity itself is first and foremost by getting it all on the table. We
are talking in circles and affirming only with people who inherently
agree with us, rather than trying to understand where the people who
don’t are coming from. This is not change. This is ego-steroids.
There’s so much value placed around “helping others” and “being

---

selfless” and forcing people to volunteer when they don’t genuinely
want to.
The only kindness we grow and support is that which we force on
other people, the sort we perceive as correct.
Fake kindness is not worth it. It makes the world worse. It is the
root of resentment and ill will and self-hatred and bigotry and
prejudice.
Often the kindest things we experience in life are the moments in
which someone cared more about who we were than how our
feelings would be hurt to tell us the truth that saved us or showed us
some otherwise invisible reality. Often the way we are kindest to
ourselves is by saying “no.” Often the things we are most grateful for
are the ones that were (and are) the most trying, the most deeply
compelling, the most wholly changing, even if, at first, they aren’t
necessarily comfortable.
So you should say no when you want to say no. You should speak
precisely and kindly and with understanding but directness when you
see a friend struggling to make a simple choice that will have a
profound effect on their entire quality of life, instead of walking away
and discussing with everybody else but them. You should leave your
house if in it; you’re not wanted. There are ways to pay the rent;
there is no way to make somebody love you when they don’t. You
should say how you feel before it stays in the darkness so long that it
becomes the foundation on which the rest of your life is built—and
then collapses through. You should tell the people you love that you
love them. You should tell the people you don’t that you don’t, and let
them find people who really do. You should dig deep into the
untouched abyss of yourself and see what you come out with. First,
it will be the unhealed wounds you didn’t know you had. Second, it
will be the light and love and passion under which they rest. Third, it
will be the desire to take those things and run with them and build
something remarkable. You should evaluate your choices not in light
of how other people will perceive them, but how in line with your
deepest, truest self they are.
You should rise and say, “This is who I am, even if you’ll crucify me
for it” in the very way so many religious and political and social idols

---

and icons have, even if their fans and followers are the very ones
who will do the crucifying.
You should give to others what you most need. Which, more often
than not, is to say the following: You are not loved by everybody, but
that does not mean you are not loved at all. You are not the most
beautiful, but being the most beautiful is not what matters most. You
are bound by nothing but your own fear, so you will not find freedom
anywhere but within yourself. Everybody suffers. Not everybody
comes out on the other end shimmering and ready to let that light
reverberate through the dense and otherwise impermeable
darkness. Not everybody has the guts to be truthful, but everybody
has the capacity to. And the greatest irony, the most profoundly
cunning thing of all, is that the very love and passion and acceptance
we are seeking resides nowhere else but within our own unbridled
honesty. So go to it, and let it finally breathe.

---

65
7 REASONS WHY 
HEARTBREAK IS