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In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. — George Orwell
I have been thinking about truth this week. It’s tempting to call truth a slippery fish, but that’s more cynical than I tend towards when it comes to truth. In my life it has been accurate more often than not, as author Rayya Elias used to say, that the truth has legs. When everything else falls down, it is always truth that is left standing.
It can take a damn long time, though, for everything else to fall down.
I started thinking about truth this week because my annual spring freelance gig has started in earnest. I write reports on progressive corporate shareholder proposals coming up for a vote at the current year’s annual meetings, also known as proxy season. Over the years I’ve written about the gender and racial pay gap, human rights audits, sugar and public health, surveillance technology and civil liberties, and systemic racism. The last couple of years I’ve focused almost exclusively on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues.
These reports are supposed to be non-biased, so I do my best to give companies the benefit of the doubt. I pour over their websites, social responsibility reporting, governance documents, and Securities & Exchange Commission filings for any evidence, however scattered or small, that they actually understand the issues at hand and are acting accordingly. It pains me how often I can’t find anything.
This week I was working on a report for a company called A.O. Smith. It makes water heaters and other sorts of home water appliances for a global market, but its headquartered in Milwaukee, WI. Milwaukee is a majority minority city. Only 34% of the population is non-Hispanic White. And yet, less than a third of A.O. Smith’s U.S. workforce are people of color.
The company only started focusing attention on improving its workforce gender diversity in 2018. In that time the percentage of women in its workforce has actually declined by 3%. What would have happened if they weren’t officially paying attention?, one wonders. Despite this marked decline being right there in black and white in their own reports, they don’t acknowledge it or offer any explanation for it. Instead, the company proclaims that based on the success of its efforts to address gender diversity, as of 2022 it is applying the same strategies to improving racial and ethnic diversity in its workforce.
I am reminded of the Princess Bride. Success? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
This kind of disconnect between words and actions could rightly be called hypocrisy, but what is hypocrisy but a truth crisis? The veracity of your words betrayed by the undeniable truth of your behavior.
I will confess, even after all these years, to being naively boggled by the ways that corporations bob and weave with their words under the assumption that they’ll be able to deflect attention from the actions which obviously contradict and betray them. As soon as you actually pay attention to the evidence, which is publicly provided by law by the companies themselves, the “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert used to call it is as clear as a cloudless, blue sky.
As clearly, they are counting on no one paying that close of attention. Or perhaps, just not caring as long as the company continues to turn a profit. The latter, sadly, is not an unfounded assumption.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.— Virginia Woolf
I’ve also been thinking about truth this week because, as obvious as the hypocrisy often is when looking at these publicly-traded companies, navigating truth as a private individual can be remarkably hard. Knowing what the truth is, who holds it, and how to handle it when truths compete.
Mahatma Gandhi insisted that, “Even if you’re a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” He clearly never had a complicated, long-term emotional relationship of any kind. Recently, I had a dear friend come to me with a painful, vulnerable emotional truth which implicated me. My initial response was to be defensive because my emotional truth was different, and it seemed to me that the objective truth, based in the hard realities of time, agreed with me. Remember, though, how last week I referenced a recent study published by Cornell researchers about our experience of time being affected by our heartbeat?
[Did that study then get written up in the New York Times two days after I wrote about it? Yes! Did I have a small, private moment of satisfaction that I had scooped the NYT? Yes! Does that truth matter at all? Not even a smidge.]
Our experience of time is, it turns out, entirely subjective. Meaning, my experience of time, both physically and emotionally, has been different from hers over the last handful of months. And in order to respond to her in the most loving way possible, I have to sit in the discomfort that that is true. I don’t have to agree with her, or feel the same way about it, but I can’t entirely discount her either. I have to allow her truth to exist in my heart right next to mine. This requires expanding my heart in ways that, I’m not going to lie, are painful. Not because I don’t love her. Not because I don’t think it’s worth it to do the necessary work. Simply because stretching (unless you’re some kind of weird emotional contortionist) is often freakin’ excruciating.
Half a truth is often a great lie.— Benjamin Franklin
Another thing happened this week that brought the challenges of truth to the forefront for me. There’s navigating the potential differences between words and actions. There’s negotiating divergent emotional truths. And then there’s what is the most consistent challenge for me: ferreting out the truth when I don’t quite know what it is yet, and taking ownership when I’ve said something in the process that isn’t, in fact, entirely true. I hate that part.
I don’t know about you, but I’m someone who actually figures out what I really think and feel, what’s true for me, by talking about it. This is why talk therapy has always really worked for me. Stating something out loud, hearing myself say it, and then reflecting on whether that thing I just said is actually true is an essential emotional process for me. It’s fine to do that when you’re paying someone to walk through that process with you, and most of the truths you’re working to articulate have nothing to do with them. It’s less fine, or at least more complicated, when what you’re articulating are half-baked truths about other people that you are in the midst of talking to because you are in a relationship with them.
I cracked to my partner this week that he’s not “sweet”, which is mostly not true. He often behaves quite sweetly towards me, and he (much more occasionally) says sweet things to me. In the moment I was dancing toward something that is true, but I didn’t have the right words for it quite yet and saying anything out loud made me feel really vulnerable.
Is there any greater impediment to speaking truthfully than the psychic constriction that arises in response to feeling vulnerable? Not for me. So, I made a blanket statement that put me closer to the words that were actually true without being, in fact, actually true. And just like with my dear friend, his emotional truth about who he is didn’t line up, so he was kind of like, WTF? I know this, not because he actually said, What the fuck? That’s not true!, but because he referenced his sweetness in a text to me a few days later. Clearly, the disconnect was lingering.
What was I trying to say? I’m still working that out. Ironically, it was about vulnerability. About wanting him to be, with his words, more consistently tender and vulnerable, particularly at times that feel emotionally high-stakes for me. Because I feel vulnerable and tender in those moments, I want to know, for absolute sure and guaranteed, that I’m not alone.
Setting aside the reality that nothing is sure and guaranteed in any relationship, much less a romantic one, it’s understandable that I would want that given my history. It’s also true that, temperamentally, my partner isn’t a word guy. He shows rather than tells. So, what I’m asking is for him to stretch his heart, which we’ve already covered is, at best, uncomfortable. Isn’t that kind of the deal with love, to stretch ourselves, though? Sure. But we also get to be who we are, so that always has to get factored in. In other words, there are two truths competing for priority here— what I understandably want given who I am and what he can, or wants to, offer in response given who he is.
It’s also true that I can’t let that thing I said, which is not really true, sit out there between us. I have to loop back around and say, Hey. I said something the other day that wasn’t true. I’m sorry. Here’s what I think is actually true. What, if anything, can you do with that?
Am I loving the anticipation of that conversation? Not. At. All. Do I know I have to have it anyway because that’s what my integrity requires of me? Yes. Dammit.
I heard someone say recently that integrity is the head to the heart to the hand. In other words, we have ideas about things that we have to check in with our hearts to see if we actually believe, if they are true, and then we have to act accordingly. Sometimes it’s not our hands that act, but our mouths. Yet we still have to make sure of that alignment between head and heart and voice, even if it means looping back around to clean up after ourselves later. Even if no one is asking us to do that work but ourselves.
What is the hardest thing about truth for you?
The truth will set you free. But not until its finished with you.— David Foster Wallace
Hey! I don’t usually do recommendations in the “I liked this and you might like it too” sort of simple way, but I just finished watching UnPrisoned on Hulu and you should absolutely watch it. There is so much deep psychological, emotional, and social truth in this show.
Oh boy. I’m feeling this one. The part about the mental impediment of vulnerability... I struggle with that so much. It’s one of the reasons why I detach. I know how dangerous it can be for me to speak in those moments when I don’t have the words. I am getting better at letting people know that I need some time to work things out before I say anything. When I do that the words do come. I do say them and brace myself for impact. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I’m super grateful for the people that have heard it shared their own truth and there was still room to continue the relationship in a better way. Thanks for this one lady. You always inspire me.
This made a whole lot of sense to me, and FOR me. You are inspiring me to crawl out of the rabbit holes I've been in and, in an act of pure courage, open a substack channel.
And yes, to begin a draft of my first post in ages on it (I do have a couple of blog posts out of a couple of hardly ever utilized sites). I am asked by others to do the work about my truths. Time to get off my butt and get the word out...