in-sincerity

I love words. I love finding the exact word or phrasing for the feeling(s) I'm trying to express to others. I love that words have multiple meanings; I love words that come from interesting roots; I love that one word can be an entire sentence (best ever, per m. lodge: buffalo). I love that there are people who dedicate themselves to the study of words, whether that dedication is to linguistics or to the two-letter scrabble word lists. we have so many words in the english language, so what's not to love about trying to know or use as many as you can?

when coming up with the perfect phrase to capture my hope for this blog, I started with one thought: that I am a sincere person. I wanted to be able to express that easily, since I know anyone who would read this would soon learn it (if not known already). in recognizing my sincere nature, I know that I cannot fake my feelings, for I have learned over the years that faking feelings or sentiments make me a cranky person. not only that, but my true feelings always show immediately on my face. therefore it has turned out to not be worth my time to fake anything because anyone paying the slightest bit of attention will see right through me.

being sincere doesn't necessarily give way to my own naivety when it comes to others, though it does fill me with a certain amount of hope that others are in fact as sincere as I would want them to be. I expect a certain amount of sincerity and truth to my interactions with other people, and I am prone to maintaining a faith in those two qualities in others during those interactions. does this often make me gullible, and liable to believe people a little too much? yes. does it also allow me to give the benefit of the doubt to most people? yes. however, based on a recent conversation with a friend, I often wonder how many people around me are also as sincere and/or aware of their transparency as I am. I know enough about human nature to know that there are those who are not. can I tell the difference? that has yet to be shown. maybe this friend has just as skewed a view of people as I do, only from the opposite direction, due to a personal amount of pessimism and disbelief in the goodness of others. regardless, I continue to hope that people are being sincere and true to themselves more often than not.

despite my statements above, being sincere also doesn’t necessarily give way to me being entirely truthful all the time. but it does push me into feeling awful when I’m not being truthful, and later issuing only sincere apologies when I get around to it. (for more thoughts on this, see this fantastic psychology today short.) and, it inspires me to try a little harder the next time at front-loading my sincerity instead of having to show it under such awkward circumstances later.

in the end it seems to me that sincerity isn't only about being true to others, it's more about being true to how you actually feel. I think that if more of the world spent more time being true to their own feelings, they would find that being true to, and therefore just being with, others becomes much easier and more enjoyable. so whether something I experience is done in sincerity or with insincerity, whatever gets said about it here will be my own words, my own truth... which I hope will be enjoyable for both of us.