There’s a hard lesson that a lot of us learned really early in life…
Be honest… and watch people disappear.
I didn’t learn that in a classroom. I learned it in living rooms. In conversations that got quiet when I finally said what was real. In relationships that were good until I stopped pretending. The moment I stopped performing and started telling the truth, some people got uncomfortable. And uncomfortable people don’t always stay.
So I adjusted.
I learned to soften my words a bit. I learned to read the room. I learned to give people the version of me that wouldn’t rock the boat. For a while, that strategy worked. I kept more people around with less tension and fewer arguments.
But here’s what nobody tells you.
When you abandon honesty just to keep people in your life, you start to slowly disappear too.
A lot of us who walked through trauma learned that honesty wasn’t safe. Telling the truth about what happened... telling the truth about how we felt... telling the truth about what we needed. Maybe it got ignored. Maybe it got mocked. Maybe it even got punished. So we adapted. We became agreeable, quiet, and low maintenance.
That survival skill helped us then.
It’s suffocating us now.
I’ve had times in my life where telling the truth cost me friendships. When I got honest about my struggles, some people pulled back. When I got honest about boundaries, some people labeled me as difficult. When I stopped pretending I was fine, some people stopped calling.
That was all the proof I needed that I was doing something wrong.
Now I see it a little differently.
Honesty doesn’t make the right people leave… It filters the wrong ones out.
If someone can only stay connected to the fugazi (fake) version of you, they were never connected to you in the first place. They were connected to your performance.
And I’m not interested in performing anymore.
There’s strength and freedom in saying, “This is who I am. This is what I’ve been through. This is what I need.” Not with arrogance or aggression. Just with clarity.
Yes… some people will disappear.
Let them.
Jeff
PS - If you’ve been changing yourself to keep people around, I get it. That strategy probably protected you once like it did me. But you’re not that powerless kid anymore. You don’t have to trade your truth for friendships anymore.
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