Why Avoiding White Lies Will Save You Pain and Give You Freedom

You can’t please anyone by people-pleasing

A European friend once said, “all Turkish girls lie to their parents.”

It was a shock. At first, I said I didn’t do it. My parents were not like the rest of the Turkish parents; they weren’t overly strict or controlling. I had no reason to lie to them.

But then I remembered all the white lies I had told them anyway, just so they wouldn’t have to worry. The times I shut up and hid important stuff. Because my parents indeed worried a lot. They still do.

And admittedly, I still lie to them sometimes.

I had a boyfriend who always insisted I go to his house where he lived with his parents. I wouldn’t tell my parents where I was, but his parents always knew.

And unlike my parents, they were conservative Muslims. I could tell they weren’t happy to see me, but we would never sneak in or lie about “working on a project.” My boyfriend would make sure everyone saw me. We would say “Hi!,” go into his room, shut the door, and spend the afternoon in his bed.

I would ask him, “How do your parents approve of this? Aren’t you afraid? How can you be so audacious?” And he would say, “Surely they don’t approve. It takes me lots of unpleasant conversations but they know they can’t control my life and I will do whatever I want.”

I admired it, but such brutal honesty was out of my reach. My European friend was right. Turkish girls want to experience freedom like others. But fear is so ingrained in our DNA that we can’t easily break our chains. And even when we do, we have to deal with a lifetime of shame and guilt. We try to juggle our freedom with obligations to keep everyone happy.

After living as a liar for many decades, I exposed myself to different cultures and realized there were other ways to live. I had a right to be who I was and I didn’t deserve all that shame. I gradually simplified my life and became more honest.

I’m not arguing honesty from a moral perspective here. Being honest with my family and social…

Related posts:

Christians around the world know that there are certain prophecies in the Bible that foretell the Apocalypse! What are the signs of the end of the world? Some believers believe that the Apocalypse is…

CollectD as a famous monitoring tool not only extracts the metrics of system or application itself but also can help you to customize any figure into the pipeline. We will go through a real case…

My vision for the enterprise blockchain computing industry is there will be an interoperable network of computers around the world that are made up of different crypto and blockchain protocols…