As a child, my mother raised me with the message that lying is unacceptable. She never understood why people found it so hard to just tell the truth, and encouraged me to realize that there were always harsher consequences for lying than for whatever I was trying to cover up. Therefore in my mind, the truth meant giving an unbiased, factual account of an event or situation that took place. I was confident in my idea of the meaning of truth, so when social media started showcasing the hashtag “speaking my truth”, I was immediately puzzled. I didn’t understand how one was to tell their personal truth because in reality there can only be one truth. I believe the phrase “my truth” holds no real meaning because someone’s unpopular opinion is not their truth.
Although dumbfounded at first by the idea of, “speaking my truth”, I quickly realized that “my truth” is actually just when a popular influencer musters up the courage to share a slightly unpopular opinion. For example, when scrolling a few nights ago I saw a video in which a woman is passionately arguing that Taylor Swift is overrated, and in a fitting manner, she threw #SpeakingMyTruth in the caption. Now, this is where I get engulfed in rage about the stupidity of the term, because any dictionary definition of the word truth includes that there must be something factual backing your truth, and it’s well known that fact and opinion are antonyms, so how is your opinion a fact-based truth? The words simply contradict themselves.
I also continue to have confusion about where we learned that we can share extremely unimportant opinions in an attempt to “live authentically” and make these random opinions seem more aesthetic by calling them “our truths”. We need to realize that as a society, stating an opinion is just that, and assigning an underrated opinion some fancy label doesn’t take away from the fact that it is truly just your opinion. Therefore, I make the argument that we move away from the notion of “speaking our truths” because first off, the idea of your truth being an opinion makes no sense, and second adding aesthetic labels to make yourself seem brave for sharing an opinion does not turn your opinion into something more.
To conclude, because I’ve had such a strong sense of the word truth since I was little, I will never believe that “my truth” holds any real meaning. I will always believe that truth needs to be backed by a fact, not just by our thoughts and feelings. In addition, I do not believe claiming our slightly underrated opinions as “our truths” makes any sense, nor do I think it makes any sense to try and make our opinions seem more important by slapping some label on them. Therefore, let’s start working on moving past this useless phrase and realizing that your opinion is just your opinion and that’s okay.
