On Honesty, Integrity, and Holding Your Tongue

Some thoughts on our most common challenges

Honesty and integrity have always been the most important virtues to me. Mama hammered it into me early on: Do not steal, do not lie.

One summer, when I was five or six, I heard the ice cream truck arrive on our street (isn’t that melody the best song ever?), so I started frantically looking for Mama to ask her for some coins to buy a cone. I couldn’t find her, but she’d never said no before, so I figured it’d be okay to get her wallet out of the kitchen drawer and help myself to the money. As a result, I received one of the worst spankings I remember.

The lesson was so profound that over time, I even became a little OCD about it. In stores, I started feeling self-conscious: Did the storekeeper think I was going to steal something? Which then made me hunch my shoulders and glance around furtively—in a word, behave like I’d really stolen something. For a while, I avoided stores altogether because of this.