The Day I Told The Truth...and Didn't Stop

Last week some Millenial had Geri Halliwell (The Spice Girl) on their podcast and wrote a hagiography on her on LinkedIn.

As someone who was 18 when The Spice Girls hit, and someone just a few years younger than Geri, I found this version of history somewhat removed from fact.

What we witness over and again on that platform is personal brand building which has these main components:

The repeated promotion of a handful of dubious facts
The suppression of many inconvenient truths
The relentless celebration of others whom you wish to be seen as similar to
Silence on inconvenient realities

I am the number one enemy of personal branding, by the way.

Anyway I wrote a comment highlighting a suppressed inconvenient truth about Geri halliwell, which got 27 likes and some comments.

And hours later, as I cycled home after waitressing in the dark down country lanes, which is always exhiliarating, I realised:

Oh yeah. I don't have to lie anymore.

And that's what this was about.

Everyday, as a Head of Marketing paid for 25 years to tell lies just related enough to the truth that we wouldn't get in legal trouble (nice definition of marketing, that).

All I wanted was to be able to say what I think, all of the time.

It's a luxury which has cost me a home, a career, financial security.

And it was worth all of it.

One day I quit my job and I started telling the truth.

I haven't stopped yet.

All of this is horseshit

The size of your social following.

Your social engagement rate.

Your current salary.

The big account followers you have.

Your personal brand.

Your cosy chats with the CEO.

His promises that you're going places.

Your oversized car that nearly runs me off the road.

All of this is horseshit.

Let me tell you in the entire last year of meeting so many great people:

No-one knows what SaaS is or cares
No-one knows what CAC means and they aren't interested
Real people aren't even on LinkedIn

The world is so much bigger and exciting than we allow ourselves to imagine.

ou know what telling the truth does?

It makes you brave.

It makes you poor, at first. Then clear. Then dangerous.

It starts quietly. A comment here. A refusal there. You stop laughing at that thing your boss says. You don’t back down when someone calls you “difficult.” You say: I’m not difficult. I’m just not pretending anymore.

And slowly, the mask drops. The tension in your shoulders starts to ease. You stop editing yourself in real time. You sleep a bit better. You start becoming—bit by bit—the person you always wanted to be when you were ten and hadn’t yet learned how to perform.

Telling the truth is a detox. Not the kind you buy in a bottle, but the kind where your whole body shakes and all your fake smiles come back up. It's withdrawal from a drug called approval. A withdrawal from the psychological mechanism we now recognise as Stockholm Syndrome—where you become loyal to the system that degrades you because it's the only system you've known.

The workplace, the algorithm, the culture of high-performing, hashtag-hustling middle managers—none of it survives when we stop cosplaying sanity.

The American Psychological Association has published studies showing that lying—habitual lying, the kind that lubricates most offices—raises cortisol, increases the risk of depression, even messes with your immune system. When you lie all the time, you literally start to disown your own body. You abandon yourself just enough to keep the paycheque. Just enough to stay liked. Just enough to stay safe.

But the cost is spiritual. The cost is psychic. You start waking up tired. You look in the mirror and don’t recognise yourself. You forget what you used to love. You forget you even had a voice.

And here’s the punchline: the moment you stop lying, not only do you remember who you are—you get things done. Good things. Brave things. Real things.

Because people trust someone who’s not afraid to say what they see.

Because your energy—previously spent managing optics, smoothing egos, crafting careful emails—gets redirected to actually doing stuff. Building. Making. Walking away from the wrong people and towards the right ones. And laughing, properly, with your mouth open, because you’re not worried anymore if someone thinks you’re too much.

When you tell the truth, you attract the truth. Real friends. Real work. Real opportunities.

And yeah—it’s true. The truth costs you. It costs you comfort, applause, belonging in certain rooms.

But if the room only wants you for your silence, you don’t belong there anyway.

What you gain is worth everything you lost.

You gain a spine. A voice. A laugh. A compass. A self.

You become fireproof.

You start to belong to yourself.

And that’s freedom. Not the kind that comes with a sabbatical or a bigger bonus. The kind that comes when you look around and realise:

There is nothing left to fear, because there is nothing left to hide.

So I’ll say it again:

I started telling the truth.

And I haven’t stopped yet.

And I won’t.

In fact, I've barely begun.