The Difficulty of Being Honest with One's Self

Being honest with one's self is one of the most difficult things one can do with one's self.

In general, honesty often seems hard.  That thought takes me a little by surprise because it would not seem to be so.  I would like to think that honesty is the easier thing to do than prevaricate or fill the space with words while we really say nothing at all. Perhaps in my mind I have this image of honesty as a thing which it is not:  a blade which easily slices through the cobwebs and old trappings of our life and makes a path.

Honesty can indeed be a blade.  But the fact of blades is that the cut everything in their paths without a regard for what it is.  And that is where honesty with the self becomes difficult.  Because I am often very reluctant to turn that blade loose on my own soul lest I see things that I do not wish to see.

If I were honest with myself - genuinely honest with myself - I fear what I would find there.  I have suspicions of these things lying beneath the surface, waiting to make there way from hidden feeling to action.  I know that there are words there waiting to be said that would be destructive beyond belief, actions waiting to be released which could hurt others in my life - not the physical actions but the far more frightening actions of bad decisions, which leave psychic scars which never truly go away. I would find myself face to face with the illusions I carefully maintain and the dreams I carefully nurture in the face of a reality which says that neither are true and cannot really exists.

Would there be good to come out of a true session of self-honesty?  I believe that there would be.  But it is difficult to grasp what that would be.  Perhaps this arises from a sense that self honesty never results in greater clarity of mind or purpose but only in the revelation of that which I have buried and preserved inside.

Is it because I ultimately perceive myself to have failed in some great task, the one thing which I seem to keep pursuing as a goal even as I do not fully know what it is or what I should be doing?  Perhaps.  Failure often makes it difficult to be honest, except in a way which always seems to tear one down in the process.

As I write this there is a sense of walking on ice that is millimeters thick, threatening to crack lest I put too much weight on it.  I have come to recognize this feeling:  it is the feeling of being very close to something which is going to make me very uncomfortable to deal with and I am assiduously lest I suddenly find myself face to face with a truth.

It is beneath my consciousness, roiling beneath the ice.  The question is, am I willing to break the ice and look in?