The Lies We Tell Ourselves to Avoid the Truth

A friend once told me, completely straight-faced, that she was "totally fine" about not being invited to a wedding she clearly should have been invited to. Her voice didn't waver. Her expression was calm. But her hands were folded a little too tightly in her lap, and she brought it up again, unprompted, three separate times over the next hour.

I didn't say anything at the time. But I remember thinking, that's strange — if it really doesn't matter, why does it keep coming back up?

That memory came flooding back while I was reading a chapter in The Hidden Laws of the Heart by Muhammad Bilal that gave me a mental image I genuinely have not been able to shake since. It's the idea of the flying elephant — and once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere, including in your own mouth.

Imagine someone insists they saw an elephant fly

Picture this: someone walks up to you, dead serious, and says, "I saw an elephant flying in the sky yesterday." Not joking. Not exaggerating for effect. Just calmly stating it as fact, expecting you to nod along.

You wouldn't believe them. Obviously. Everything you know about gravity, biology, and reality itself tells you that's not possible. You might feel a flash of confusion, maybe some pity, maybe irritation — but you would not, for one second, actually believe an elephant flew.

Now imagine this person says it to you every single day. And every day when you don't believe them, they get frustrated and say, "why won't you believe me? Everyone else does." And you look around, and somehow, everyone else really is nodding along, agreeing, acting like flying elephants are just a normal part of life.

That's the exact feeling the book compares to something we do constantly in our own heads — and it's not about elephants at all. It's about the phrase "it doesn't matter."



"It doesn't matter" is our version of the flying elephant

Here's the connection that hit me hardest: when something actually hurts you — a friend's careless comment, being left out, a promise broken, a message left on read for three days by someone who never leaves anyone on read — and you tell yourself "it's fine, it doesn't matter," you are doing the exact same thing as agreeing an elephant flew through the sky.

It's not true. Your heart knows it's not true. It reacted the second the thing happened — that's automatic, that's just how being human works. The lie isn't in the reaction. The lie is in what you tell yourself right after, when you talk yourself out of what you just felt because admitting it feels embarrassing, dramatic, or "too sensitive."

And the wild part is, just like with the flying elephant, everyone around us is nodding along with this lie too. We've built an entire culture that rewards the calm, unbothered face and quietly judges the person who admits something got to them. So we all just keep insisting we see elephants in the sky, because that's what everyone else seems to be doing.

Why we choose the lie even though we know better

I think the reason this hit me so personally is that I've caught myself doing this constantly. Not because I'm dishonest — because pretending indifference genuinely feels safer than admitting I was affected.

If I admit something hurt, I have to admit that person has some kind of power over me. I have to admit I care. And somewhere along the way, most of us absorbed the idea that caring visibly is weak, while looking unaffected is strong.

But here's the part the book made me really sit with: pretending not to care doesn't actually make you strong. It just means you're spending constant hidden energy keeping the door shut on a feeling that's still very much there. That's not peace. That's exhaustion wearing a calm mask.

The wound that never got cleaned

There's a comparison in this part of the book that stuck with me more than almost anything else — the idea of a small scratch left uncleaned. If you actually clean a small wound early, it heals fast and barely leaves a mark. But if you slap a bandage over it without cleaning it first, telling yourself it's nothing, it doesn't disappear — it festers quietly underneath, until one day it's a real infection you can't ignore anymore.

That's exactly what happens with unspoken hurt in relationships. It doesn't vanish because you called it nothing. It just moves out of your awareness and into storage, where it sits, untreated, slowly growing.

This is why you sometimes find yourself feeling cold toward someone you used to be close to, and you genuinely can't remember the moment things changed. There usually wasn't one big moment. There was a small scratch you told yourself didn't matter, and you never went back to clean it.

Where this plays out in real life

Once I started paying attention, I saw this pattern everywhere, not just in dramatic breakups or big fights:

  • A sibling makes a "joking" comment about your job or your choices, and you laugh along at Sunday dinner, but you notice you're quieter around them for the rest of the week.
  • A coworker cancels plans on you for the third time, and you say "no worries, all good," while quietly deciding to stop suggesting plans with them altogether.
  • A partner forgets something you specifically told them was important, and you shrug it off out loud, then bring it up sarcastically two weeks later during an unrelated disagreement, surprising even yourself with how much it still stings.
  • Someone leaves a dismissive comment on a post you were proud of, and you tell yourself social media doesn't matter, while checking that comment section four more times that day.

In every one of these, the honest reaction happened immediately. The lie came after — the moment we decided calling it "nothing" was easier than dealing with it.

What the book isn't saying — and what it actually is

I want to be clear about something the book itself is careful about too: this isn't an argument for reacting to everything with full intensity, or turning every small annoyance into a confrontation. That's not the point at all.

The point is much smaller and, honestly, much more doable: stop lying to yourself about what you feel. You don't have to announce every reaction to the world. But you owe yourself an honest acknowledgment of it, at minimum.

For a stranger's rudeness or a random internet comment, feeling the sting, naming it privately, and letting it pass is enough — because that person doesn't hold any real keys to your life. But for people who actually matter to you, the ones who do hold those keys, the honest reaction deserves more than a shrug. It deserves a real look, and often, a real conversation.

Practical things you can actually do with this

Catch yourself mid-lie. The next time "it doesn't matter" comes out of your mouth, pause and ask yourself honestly — does it actually not matter, or am I just avoiding the discomfort of admitting it does?

Separate strangers from people who matter. Not everything needs a conversation. A rude stranger's comment can be felt and released. A close friend's careless comment usually deserves more honesty than "it's fine."

Clean the wound while it's small. If something bothered you, say it early and gently, before it turns into distance you can't explain later. "That comment actually kind of stung" is a five-second sentence that can save months of quiet resentment.

Notice your own patterns of avoidance. If you keep bringing something up "jokingly" or sarcastically, that's usually a sign it's not actually resolved — it's just been repackaged so it feels safer to mention.

Redefine strength for yourself. Being affected by people who matter to you isn't weakness. Pretending you're not is just a slower, quieter way of hurting yourself instead.

A question worth sitting with

What's the last flying elephant you personally agreed to believe in — the last time you said "it's fine" while something in you was quietly screaming that it wasn't?

I think about that friend from the wedding story sometimes. If she'd said "hey, it actually really hurt that I wasn't invited" instead of insisting three times that it didn't matter, I think that conversation would have gone somewhere real. Instead, it just sat there, unspoken, doing exactly what unspoken things do.

That's the piece of The Hidden Laws of the Heart by Muhammad Bilal that I keep coming back to — not that we feel too much, but that we've gotten disturbingly good at convincing ourselves we don't, and calling that skill maturity.