There is no such thing as truth and lies. A person can “tell the truth” or “tell a lie” but it’s meaningless.

In grade school, we were taught about the difference between fact and opinion. A fact is something that is and an opinion is how someone feels about something. A fact is universal but an opinion is personal, individual.

There was no such distinction made for true and false. It’s much less concrete. And ‘truth’ embodies ‘fact’. Truth is based on perception and each person’s perception is unique and cannot be fathomed, or therefore measured, by another person.

Fact: the sky is blue. Sure. Unless you consider that it may appear pink or yellow or green to someone else looking at the very same sky. Same moment, same vantage point. Our eyes are different.

And I keep coming back to this same thought I had as a child, being taught this fact bullshit in school. I say the sky is blue (in general) and so do you. We might be seeing two totally different colours but were taught that the hue we saw is called blue. If I left my body and entered yours, maybe your blue is my red. There is no way of knowing what another person perceives. The same goes for truth. What you know to be true, I may know differently.

…This is making my head hurt. I knew where I was going before, but now I’m lost.

How confusing then that truth is not only fluid from person to person but from time to time within one person. “It was true at the time…”

It doesn’t exist.

Update (sort of): Imagine my surprise when, over six months after writing this post, I stumble across this video which basically says THE EXACT SAME THING I have been saying since I was a child in regards to the personal differences in perception of the same colour. I have literally been trying for years to explain this to many different people and no one seemed to get what I was saying. All of a sudden, I hear someone else’s words explaining the same thought. I was so excited! And it was actually an accident that I came across the video at all. I was searching for information about synesthesia and this was in the ‘up next recommendations’ side bar. Awesome.