Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

How honest can UT—without the eye—really be if she won’t even tell you who the hell she is?

And honestly?

If that’s your concern, I can’t really blame you.

I get it.

How can somebody build a whole space around being unfiltered while keeping the biggest detail about themselves hidden?

Fair question.

And if that bothers you enough that you can’t get past it, this is probably where you should leave.

No hard feelings.

But for everybody else who wants to stay, let’s chat.

There was a time when I thought I wanted honesty.

I wanted people to tell me everything.

How they felt.
What they thought.
What they had done.
What they were hiding.
What they wanted.
What they didn’t want.

I thought honesty meant complete access.

Then I realized something uncomfortable.

That same honesty was required of me.

And that changed the conversation.

Because once I had to turn that expectation around and ask myself how much of me I was willing to hand over simply because somebody wanted to know, I realized I had been confusing honesty with entitlement.

Those are not the same thing.

I don’t believe I have the right to know everything about another person simply because I’m close to them.

And they don’t automatically have the right to know everything about me.

There are parts of yourself that belong to you.

Your memories.

Your fears.

Your mistakes.

Your private thoughts.

Your history.

The pieces of yourself you are still trying to understand.

And choosing not to share every single one of those things does not automatically make you dishonest.

Sometimes privacy is just privacy.

There is a difference between lying to someone and deciding that a part of you is not theirs to access.

That distinction took me a while to understand.

Because we love saying things like:

“If you have nothing to hide, why hide it?”

But everybody has something they keep for themselves.

Maybe it’s a memory you’ve never told anyone.

Maybe it’s something you’re ashamed of.

Maybe it’s a dream you’re afraid somebody will laugh at.

Maybe it’s a version of yourself you haven’t figured out how to explain yet.

Or maybe it simply belongs to you.

That should be enough.

Me personally?

At this moment, this is where that part of me lives.

Behind UT.

Behind the words.

Behind the eye you don’t get to see.

And I’m okay with that.

Because I can be honest about what I think without giving you my legal name.

I can tell the truth about something I’ve experienced without handing over every identifying detail attached to it.

I can be vulnerable without making myself completely accessible.

And I think that is something we need to talk about more.

People say they want honesty, but a lot of the time what they really want is access.

They want to know everything.

They want explanations.

They want details.

They want to feel like nothing exists outside of what they’ve been allowed to see.

But being honest does not mean forfeiting your right to have something that is yours.

And maybe that is the kind of honesty I’m interested in here.

Not confession for confession’s sake.

Not exposing every wound.

Not telling strangers every detail of my life just to prove I’m “real.”

I’m more interested in being truthful about the things I choose to discuss.

If I talk about love, I want to tell the truth about it.

If I talk about failure, I want to tell the truth about that too.

If I say I’ve been wrong, I want to mean it.

If I say something hurt, I don’t want to dress it up just because the truth sounds ugly.

That’s the kind of honesty I can promise you.

The rest?

That’s mine.

And maybe somewhere along the way, you’ll realize you have parts of yourself that deserve to stay yours too.

— UT

Without the I.