How to Tell the Truth

This program is a truth-telling program. That’s how it turns us into free people.
~Ron H., Centre for Action and Contemplation, referring to Alcoholics Anonymous

The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.
~Anonymous

I'm 55 years old. I've lived through plenty of heartbreak and betrayal. I'm currently living in a political climate in which it's more likely that leaders are lying than telling the truth. I operate in a profession that is mistrusted and cast as "enemy of the people" though I don't know a single journalist colleague who isn't committed to truth-telling. 
I struggle to understand how people lie. I just don't get it, how to look someone in the face – or straight into a camera – and unleash a whopper. Or even a white lie.
I often hear women say that it wasn't so much the extramarital sex they struggle with post-infidelity but the lying. (We're not crazy about the extramarital sex, for the record.) That our partners could lie to us turns out world upside down. It makes us doubt everything and everyone. It makes us doubt reality. It is gaslighting and can take years for us to recover from. 
My husband was a consummate liar, though I wouldn't have framed it that way back when we were first building a life together. He told "white lies". Harmless right? H'mmm...
For instance, we moved in together after months of lugging our stuff back and forth to each other's apartments and realizing that we were paying rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world on two apartments but essentially living in one. We were engaged so...made sense to move in and get rid of one of the apartments. But then my husband insisted I keep mine (which was the cheaper one) along with continuing to pay for my phone (pre-cell phone). He told me it would upset his mother too much. That she was "traditional" and that he wanted to "respect that". I went along with it even as I thought it was nuts. I even thought it was mildly quaint that he respected her traditional sensibilities so much. Except...
Except it was a lie. I wasn't living in my apartment. I wasn't answering my phone. I was somewhere else. With him. 
But, I ignored my discomfort. I prioritized what I believed was HER comfort over my own desire to live honestly. 
Years later, after I discovered that my husband hadn't just been lying to his mother but to ME for YEARS, I realized that he had given me important information and that I had overlooked it.
He had shown me that he would easily lie rather than live honestly. That lying was a way not of respecting someone else's views but of making them complicit in the lie. That lying was about HIS comfort, his desire to avoid others' judgement.
I should have known.
But, as the saying goes, when we know better, we do better.
And when I knew better, I not only insisted on total honesty from my husband, I demanded it from myself. 
No more, "I'm sorry, I'm busy that day" when the truth was that I didn't want to volunteer at the pizza lunch.
No more, white lies, no more "sparing others' feelings, no more lying to avoid conflict. 
And no more lying to myself. 
It's easier said than done, of course. And I haven't become some sort of monster who tells people that I hate their haircuts, or that their kids are monsters, or that the meal they lovingly made tastes horrible.
But I have bit my tongue when I'm tempted to lie to get out of something I don't want to do and instead left it as simply, "No," even if I was squirming with discomfort. (As my therapist used to remind me, "No" is a complete sentence.) 
I have told friends some uncomfortable truths and also heard some. I was able to appreciate others' ability to be honest with me.
Being honest has made me braver. My friendships have easily survived some difficult conversations. Other friendships withered because I realized they were rooted less in genuine caring than in convenience. 
Honesty is liberating. Not at first, perhaps. At first, it's squirmy. And sometimes infuriating. And often painful.
But there is no other healthy way to live than within relationships that demand and dispense honesty. Anyone telling you otherwise is asking you to participate in a charade. And is prioritizing their own comfort over anything else.