Telling doozies was once my forte.
I told my first third-grade best friend that my parents had a remote-controlled helicopter they’d fly around on the 4th of July that would dispense firecrackers down my unsuspecting neighbors’ pants. When I was a teenager, I told my first girlfriend that I got a cheap bracelet from my ex-girlfriend—who died in an automobile accident the day after she gave it to me. In High School, I told a bully that I beat up a mentally-challenged kid and was placed in anger management so I could look tough and be left alone.
None of it was true. I lied. I was a liar.
In reality, my mom gave us sparklers on the 4th of July and my dad got drunk. That girl who gave me the bracelet never existed, and I never hurt a kid let alone a mentally-handicapped one, nor was I ever in anger management. I lied as a way of manipulating the people around me so they would like me, pity me, or fear me, and in every situation I ended up looking like a dipshit.
You know those moments where you remember something extremely shameful and you hang your head in the middle of doing something else? It happens to me all the time, because there was a long period in my life where all I could do was lie in order to pervert the world around me to my needs. Honestly, shame can’t describe the horrible creature that sits in my stomach and twists my organs with its tiny black hands.
And yet I’ve suffered alone. No one from my past asks me about that time I won a game winning touchdown at the Superbowl (I’m sure I’ve said it). No one’s cared to ask me about my ten-foot tall uncle. Not a single person asks why my dad hasn’t shot a target from Earth to the Moon using his superior marksmanship. And not a single soul has even insisted upon hearing for the second time how my family once hunted lions, tigers and bears on a big game reserve.
It would seem that nobody gives a shit.
Conversely, while lies have damaged my own integrity, truth has caused its share of woes. My middle school history teacher told me he’d knock my ass down if I didn’t stand for the pledge of allegiance after I questioned him on the ethics of forcing people to take part in such an arbitrary nationalist show of support (talk about getting friends in middle school, right?), after I told my senior year art teacher that I was late for class because I had to smoke a cigarette (I was 18, okay?), he told me he would, “burn me.” I still have no fucking clue what he meant.
I have toned down unabashed deception because truth doesn’t hurt quite as much as lying, and since I have made it my credo to not tell a fib I can proudly face the same people day after day. My shame has subsided some, too, but it wasn’t until I realized that other people have lied as muc – if not more.
The 2002 Robert Feldman study out of the University of Massachusetts found that people tell two to three lies in a ten minute conversation on average. That’s insane. How do you take anybody seriously? Granted, many of them could be half-truths or white lies; but, when I understood that the world around me was replete with untruths the very act of knowing exculpated my conscience. My personal shame turned into a social gathering of liars and thieves.
Nevertheless, I try to be far more honest than I once was, but I know shame doesn’t just disappear. Perhaps it’s my penance for trying to convince my classmates I could speak a second language in the third grade, or that time I told one of my exes that I had a really nice sports car, or that time I convinced my friends that I could drink a fifth AND a thirty pack, or that time I …
