Without secrets, we'd have no literature. Readers and movie-goers are willing to spend hours to follow the skein of deception to get to the core of truth in the end.
As a card-carrying narrative addict, I enjoy the pleasure of the journey to truth as much as the final destination, as if believing that the "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is possible, Perry Mason notwithstanding.
Along the way, there are ambiguities, different perceptions and outright blindnesses, just as in real life. It's fascinating to observe the ways we humans cover up or hide from the light of truth as much as the ways we try hard to be truthful.
I've never seen a political campaign so fraught with fact-checking and revelations of outright lies. I learned a new word that applies: Truthiness: a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
There's literal truth-telling: the facts as best we know them. But there are also plenty of ways we mostly-honest people lie to ourselves and each other, often unintentionally. We tell half-truths, we keep secrets, we gloss over details that matter, we finesse, we exaggerate.
When friends intentionally keep secrets from each other, the arteries of the heart of friendship get clogged. When friends trust each other to tell the truth as we know it, it's like rough-drafting a story: this may not be the version I want to share with the world just yet, but here it is, the embryo of a story that wants a second set of ears and eyes.
What a relief it is to tell the truth, the partial truth, and skewed perceptions of the truth! What a freedom it is to have a friend listen as the truth evolves.
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