“You only need willpower to get what you don’t want or  you only want to want. By want to want, I mean, something you wish you wanted. But you don’t really.”
-Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Surviving When You Think You Can’t 

So this is how I write.
It’s how my diaries look, when I look back on them. Spurts of writing almost every day, then suddenly a year or two of silence until I get that itch again. That itch where suddenly writing seems like the only thing I can do to express a feeling. Some nagging feeling I keep coming back to, multiple times a day for weeks, until I finally give in and it feels like coming home.

(welcome home?)

A friend, a very good friend, sent me a package a month ago with an unexpected gift. This gift was the book This Is How: Surviving When You Think You Can’t, by Augusten Burroughs. I’ve read about 90% of the book today, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who may still happen to read this blog when you see my Facebook or Twitter post pop up this afternoon.

Why? Well because I’ve only ever heard myself and my husband happen upon the idea of wanting to want until I read this book. So many ideas I’ve had, or truths I think I’ve stumbled upon, have been thought of before. And that’s a fucking wonderful thing.

Read it.

But really, what I wanted to write about is friends. It’s about how my husband once asked me why I couldn’t just tell a little lie to a friend instead of telling him to the truth so as to not hurt his feelings. It’s about how your friends tell you what you want to hear, or what they think you want to hear, or what they think they’re supposed to tell you. Or what they think is the right thing to tell you. So as not to hurt your feelings, or force some change in your life, you know?

I didn’t really need this book to reinforce it to me, and it’s not even directly what this book touches on, but I think it’s total fucking bullshit.

Friends have, in numerous occasion, come to me specifically because they know I’ll give them my true feelings on something without sugarcoating it. I hate sugarcoating. You could say I loathe it and you wouldn’t be wrong. I think we lie to each other so often it’s normal. Natural. Not even a thought that registers in your day-to-day life. Just another part of society [UGH].

Small little lies, based on how we think we ought to feel about something. Based on the idea that not rocking the boat is better than throwing your best friend overboard and telling them to fucking learn how to swim to shore because they NEED to learn how to swim to shore.

But lying to a friend

(that shirt looks amazing on you, [it doesn’t] your boyfriend is awesome [i think he’s not right for you, please stop pretending to be someone you’re not], you should keep trying at this [but don’t because at this point you should realize you’re not very good at it],  I’d love to but I can’t [actually I just want to stay home because what you’re inviting me to sounds boring], you should wait two days and then call him [why the fuck are you playing games, do you like him or not?])

is really just a disservice to them. You’re not being a good friend. You’re telling them an untruth. Every time you open your mouth to say something when you know you actually feel something different, and you have to go talk to another person to unload how you REALLY feel about it, you’re failing them as a friend.

Friends should want honesty. Friends should demand honesty. Because true honesty, with yourself and with others, is the only way to figure out what you really want in life and be able to relentlessly follow that thing.

You can’t move forward with any part of your life until you face the real (deep, buried, underlying, hard to look at) truth about who you are. Sometimes it takes someone else shining a light on the corner of that truth to really see it. To start the uncovering process. By telling a half-truth or some version of the truth to a friend, you’re just adding another layer to their own self protection. You’re throwing another sheet onto of the light of the truth that they know lives deep down but don’t want to actually see.

Or so I believe.

It’s difficult to be honest. It’s difficult to know that the words you say you might cause emotional pain in a friend, or in someone else they might affect in their actions.

But is it really better to allow them to mislead themselves?