This is an article Alicia gave me about three weeks ago. It has... been the foundation of many things over this period of time (including indirectly being the inspiration for my integration paper for Andean Roots in which I discuss the possibilities of connectivity between personal life and academics). The article is by Adrienne Rich. What I posted are the parts I find most true and... relevant.

"To discover that one has been lied to in a personal relationship makes one feel a little crazy.
Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

The woman who tells lies in her personal relationships may or may not plan or invent her lying. She may not even think of what she is doing in a calculated way. She may also tell herself a lie: that she is concerned with the other's feelings, not her own. But the liar is concerned with her own feelings.

The liar lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control. The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious. To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else.

In speaking of lies, we come inevitably to the subject of truth. There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no “the truth,” “a truth”--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. That is why the effort to speak honestly is so important. Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler--for the liar--than it really is, or ought to be.

In lying to others we end lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we lose one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even with our own lives.

The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting things in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.

When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them.

When someone tells me a piece of truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can also flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief. Often such truths come by accident, or from strangers.

It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, at the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibilities of life between us."