Blunt or Cruel?

OpEd

Blunt or Cruel?

You Can Be Honest Without Being Cruel. Most of Our Loudest Voices Choose Not To.

Blunt is fine. Contempt is a choice. And the biggest platforms in our space keep confusing the two.

For years I was cruel and I called it honesty. If you asked me how your jeans looked and the answer was bad, I told you they made your backside look like the flat end of a semi truck, and I walked away thinking I had done you a favor. "I'm just being real," I said. "I'm just being honest." I believed it, too.

What dragged all of this back up was an interview. An elite athlete talking about what the media had said about them over the last couple of years, and how it felt to sit there and hear it. It left me with a question I have not been able to put down. Can you be honest and analytical without being rude and abrasive? I know you can, because I had to learn how.

The lesson came when I moved. My new home had the opposite problem, at least to your face. People there would not say the hard thing out loud if their lives depended on it. Watching that over-correction taught me what my bluntness never did. Honest, direct, and forthcoming were never the same thing as hurtful. I had just tangled them together and called it a personality. I am still blunt. Ask anyone. I simply changed the delivery, and the delivery was always the part I controlled.

I bring up my own record because I have earned an opinion about this. I have quietly stopped playing a few podcasts in our space. Not because the analysis is wrong. Most of it is sharp, and most of it is correct. I stopped because of how the hosts talk about people.

Let me be precise about what does not bother me. I have zero problem with anyone, man or woman, commenting on an athlete's body. These are some of the most capable bodies on the planet, and what they do with them deserves attention. Here is what bothers me. Grown adults with large platforms talking about an athlete's body the way a hormonal 13-year-old boy talks about the first girl he ever noticed. There is a difference between respect and appetite, and you can hear it in about three seconds.

The performance commentary has the same problem. There is honest analysis of a bad day at a competition, and there is contempt. They are not the same, and everyone listening can tell which one they are getting. When I hear the cruel version, I have one question. Is this how you speak to your own athletes? I doubt it. Nobody competes better after being humiliated, and any decent coach already knows that.

This is the contradiction I cannot get past. These are the same voices that preach community. Encourage each other. Build each other up. Then they pick up a microphone and talk about real, named people with a contempt they would never tolerate aimed back at them. You do not get to sell people the methodology of lifting each other up and then use your platform to tear specific humans down. Pick one.

And the audience follows it. I am active in the live chats, so I see the same names show up every time, repeating whatever the host just said, word for word. One person with a big following says something, and a crowd says it right back. That points at a problem bigger than any single host. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us handed over the ability to think for ourselves.

You are careful about what you eat. You read the label, you count your protein, you notice which foods leave you feeling like garbage. Give your mind the same respect. If the loudest voice in your ears spends half its airtime running people down, ask what that is doing to you. You become what you consume. That is true of more than food.

I am not telling you to boycott anyone. I still support people in this space, and I still press play on plenty of them. I take it all with discernment, and I will not climb onto a bandwagon because someone with a big platform pointed at it. That is all I am asking of you. Be deliberate about how you speak to people. Be deliberate about what you feed your mind and your spirit. Blunt is fine. Honest is good. Cruel is a choice, and you are free to make a different one.

The author is a Functional Nutrition and Functional Medicine coach with a PhD and, by her own admission, a colorful history of confusing honesty with cruelty. She got over it. She would like the internet to try. This is commentary, not medical advice, and definitely not a bandwagon.