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The first lie I remember telling was to my grandmother over the phone, when I was maybe eight. Our cat had given birth to six kittens, I said. We didn’t even have a cat. She believed me, and when I passed the phone back to my mother, scolded her for being irresponsible enough not to spay it. My mother thought it was cute, I think. I wish I could remember why I did it.
In the third grade, I told the guidance counselor that I had four sisters, but they were all away at college. I also told her — I think at a different juncture — that I had a pet tarantula, that my brother and I shared a room, that we had run a strip of tape down the center of the floor to divide up the space. I got the latter details from a book I was reading at the time, although my brother is real. I don’t know if I still would have included him if the book hadn’t had a brother, too.
Some of these lies are easy to understand; I thought it would be cool to have a dangerous spider, just like how I thought it would be cool to have a horse, and so I told my friend Christine that I did. The sisters are less clear; I had wanted to have a sister, and wished for one when my mother was pregnant with my brother, but why four? And why send them off to college? Did I think that would cover my tracks?
Obviously none of the ideas I had at eight were hard to fact-check. I ended up having to apologize to Christine, although I don’t think anyone ever made me own up to my school guidance counselor. The million-dollar question in that story, of course, is why I was in the guidance counselor’s office in the first place; what real things I was supposed to be discussing with her rather than my complicated fictional family tree. I don’t remember what really happened there; I just remember what I made up.
In college, I would explain it to people sometimes as a cute quirk, like sleeping in a race car bed. “I used to be, like, a pathological liar when I was growing up.” I was trying it out, I think, testing what that meant to others. Most people were indifferent: “Oh really?” Sometimes people thought it was funny. No one ever asked “When did you stop?” or “did you ever?”
Later, in early high school, I discovered Photoshop (and its more affordable cousin, Photoshop Elements). During my part-time job at the public library, it was easy to flip through books on “Photoshop tips and tricks,” which, along with books on beginning HTML, were abundant in the early 2000s. I learned how to make my skin look smooth like a doll’s, rearrange my body’s proportions, change my eye color and digitally dye my hair. It wasn’t particularly realistic or believable, because I was never satisfied with an effect that made my skin look 80% better yet still realistic. I wanted it to be perfect, even if it ended up looking like silicone. I never used any of the edited photos for anything, or even showed them to anyone. Convincing other people wasn’t the point. I learned that when you start to tweak tiny details, even a little bit, the cumulative effect is a powerful one. You adjust small things, one by one, and suddenly it’s something else entirely; it’s not you at all anymore.
It’s not unusual for young kids to lie, or even teenagers. Especially teenagers. It’s especially common for kids from unstable or “troubled” homes. A lot of the lies I told were to my father, and they were for practical reasons; I don’t think anyone in the world would have done that differently. My brother and I would lie about which friends we were going to see, leaving out the names that were on Dad’s arbitrary and ever-changing blacklist. We lied about our grades and hid our progress reports, because if we had anything below an A at any point in the semester we were required to ask for a meeting with our teachers. We lied about whether our mother’s boyfriend was in her house so that Dad would drive all the way up to her driveway to drop us off rather than stopping a block away and making us walk. I don’t think we even thought of it as lying anymore. It was maintenance, a concession to the weird backbends required for some level of normalcy.
It also didn’t really matter if we lied, because even if we told the truth he didn’t believe us. If I checked out a book or wanted to watch a movie unaware that it had some minor level of sexual content — like, say, particularly passionate kissing — I was interrogated about it with the assumption that I was trying to secretly learn something forbidden. If we wanted to spend time at a friend’s house rather than home because they had better games or snacks, we were accused of trying to find excuses to avoid bringing our friends around because we were ashamed of him. Which wasn’t true — mostly. It didn’t take long before it was difficult, almost impossible to even know whether we were telling the truth.
A case study: I sat on the living room couch; my father faced me in a kitchen chair that he had pulled up directly opposite me, a makeshift interview room. I don’t remember what the conflict was this time — if I had to guess, I’d say this was the one where I wanted to switch custody weekends to spend the day of prom with my mother, so she could help me fasten my strapless bra and pin up my hair. Dad’s voice had absolutely no affect as he asked if I thought he was a worse parent than my mother, if he was a “second-class” caretaker, if I loved him less. I cried while I said no. I said I just wanted to make sure my makeup looked okay, since I wasn’t used to doing it myself. He watched stone-faced as I gulped tears and blew my nose into a tissue. “I think you’re being a little disingenuous right now, Rachel.”
I insisted I wasn’t, but realized I wasn’t actually sure. How did one know? I felt around internally for the sounding board, the stone foundation of my actual thoughts and feelings that would tell me whether my reaction was authentic, and found nothing there.
As I got older, recreational (as opposed to pragmatic) lying became more well-reasoned. I knew better than to try making shit up around people I knew, or would later have to know, or who had any way of confirming any of what I said. The stakes remained fairly low: pets I didn’t really have, fictional minor acquaintances. The things I would lie about were so inconsequential as to be absurd. Saying I had been in a new apartment for nine months instead of six; claiming I hadn’t seen the latest episode of a show when I had; telling a stranger at the bus stop that I had just come from the bookstore in the square when actually I had been at the cafe right next to it. There was no point whatsoever. The word, I guess, would be “compulsion” — something I didn’t even realize I was doing until it was already happening, and which provided me with a temporary but heady release from some nameless anxiety. The sense of relief and excitement that came from telling a stranger I lived on the green line when actually I lived on the red was unparalleled.
Lying, or even the thought of it, had always felt like it could keep me safe. As an incredibly anxious and paranoid child who tried to cajole her parents into watching over her bed while she fell asleep and couldn’t sit at the table with her back to the window because then the monsters would get her, I grew up convinced that I was in constant danger. One particularly insistent (and unrealistic) scenario had me being kidnapped by a stranger on a city street — he would, of course, be dressed like A Bad Guy, with an all-black outfit including a beanie and mask. My plan for thwarting him was to give him the wrong name, to pretend I was someone else. I worked very hard on picking out the perfect alias, something that seemed plausible but was totally unrelated to my real name: Sylvia. I had a false address, all the details of a false life. This would, somehow, protect me. I was sure of it.
Of course, there are scenarios in which it really is safer, or at least useful, for a woman to use a name that’s not hers. Maybe the only totally defensible form of lying I engage in is one that most women share: giving false information to men who are bothering me, so that they’ll go away without finding out anything truly personal. A friend of mine who was until recently single had to pull this fairly often at the bars in our small city. As we walked into one — a bar I don’t actually like very much, dim and full of televisions and men in sports jerseys — she told me she had become Melanie there over the past weekend. My friend and I look somewhat alike, and are often mistaken for each other by people who don’t know us well; we agreed that for practical purposes, Melanie could be either of us. As we drank and tried to avoid eye contact with the men sitting at the bar, we speculated about who Melanie was, her general situation. She was unlike either of us, we were sure, a totally different person. We threw out some ideas about what she might eat, watch, read, wear. I can’t put my finger on when it started to take a different turn. At some point, it became clear that Melanie was wealthier and better-educated than I was; she had better manners, was smarter. Melanie knew how to cross her legs while wearing a skirt, something I still can’t figure out. Melanie answered all her voicemail. Melanie was well informed about what was going on in Syria. Melanie could do all the things I couldn’t, was a success in all the ways I was a failure. “This is getting weird,” my friend laughed. But we kept going. We made a list.
Melanie has a pleather teddy and drinks no caffeine.
Melanie has no period stains on her underwear.
Melanie has never needed to use Plan B.
She can walk in heels but rarely does, because it’s so bad for your back.
Melanie doesn’t smoke but always has a lighter on hand for those who do.
Melanie doesn’t raise her voice during disagreements. She is never defensive.
Melanie is good in bed but never succumbs to porny cliches of sex.
Melanie can quote the best parts of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.
She doesn’t watch bad TV, ever.
Melanie stops after two beers.
We played it off like a joke, albeit a bizarre and kind of dark one. It wasn’t, though. Once you’ve tapped into it, the concept is such a seductive one: change one thing about yourself, and everything else can be different, too. You could be a whole other person, somebody else entirely.
There are a lot of lies adults tell — white lies, lies told consciously and deliberately for a reason or towards a certain noble or danger-avoiding purpose, consciously bad or good. There are a lot of small lies that women are encouraged to tell, or at least that make being a woman a lot easier. We’re incentivized to pretend we like people we don’t so as to be agreeable; to pretend that we just look like this without using makeup; pretend we’re grateful for patronizing comments; pretend we’re stupid around people who are more comfortable with stupid women than smart ones, which is a lot of people. The gigantic, ever-present lie of “No, it’s fine, really.”
I am guilty of all of these, and more. I am guilty also of the kinds of lying that bisexual people are often accused of: letting people think I’m gay, letting people think I’m straight. “You know you’re really a lesbian, right?” drunk well-meaning women ask, and I laugh and say “Sure.” I used to list my sexual orientation as ‘lesbian’ on dating sites so I wouldn’t have to explain or defend. In front of straight people, I sometimes avoid using pronouns to refer to past partners, and it always works: they don’t even notice, and just plug in “he.” In all these cases, lying is easier than the truth; it saves a lot of time and energy. Also in these cases lying is the easy way out, and ducks responsibility.
At the same time, though, it feels like I’m set up for failure. Just like in my dad’s house, I suffer the consequences of lying even when I’m not. When I’m knowledgeable about something, I’m asked if I’m just parroting something a man said; when I admit that something isn’t fine, I’m told I’m overreacting, saying a problem exists when it doesn’t. If I’m honest about the gender of a partner, or even multiple past partners, it’s still used to create a narrative that I’m either gay or straight, and my insisting that I’m not is read as a deliberate misrepresentation. If I talk about growing up with my father, I’m told I must be wrong about it. He doesn’t seem that bad, and after all, I’m still in touch with him, aren’t I? I’m not proud of all the times I’ve been dishonest, but I also don’t see how to avoid it. For some of us, there doesn’t seem to be an option of a life with a consistent truth.
These lies aren’t the dangerous ones, though — at least not to me personally. They don’t feel good to tell. I don’t like the fictional person that they create, someone who is much more palatable to the people around me than she is to me. They’re about making other people more comfortable while making myself feel much worse. It’s a different ball game, but I can’t be sure it’s totally unrelated to the other misrepresentations I’ve made. When lying is what’s made me normal and agreeable, kept me safe, in so many other situations, maybe it shouldn’t be a total surprise that it would be something I would come to rely on.
The easiest way to avoid these dealing with these questions, for me, has been to avoid talking about myself at all. I don’t have to worry about whether I’m being honest about myself to others, or to me, if “self” just isn’t on the table. For a long time I thought I had figured at least that part of it out. It’s only recently that I’ve had to realize this isn’t feasible either. My total radio silence on anything having to do with an inner life or past history is almost as dishonest as making one up, and it makes the same mistake: it means I don’t have to put anything real on the line. This summer, I was in California with Yvonne, Laneia, Riese, Grace and Alex. One night after drinking a few of the Old Fashioneds Alex made us, I was up late with Yvonne and Laneia around the kitchen counter, a little loose and a little more open.
“Have I ever told you about —“
“No,” Laneia responded before I even got to the item in question.
“Fair enough,” I said. She wasn’t wrong. I rarely told any of my coworkers anything more than what I was working on for the day, what days I needed to take off, whether I had had enough coffee. I felt hazy and buzzing and the Air BnB we were staying in was someone else’s home. In this stranger’s kitchen with the cheap olive oil and white wire dish rack and bizarre paintings of eagles, I could have been anyone. But I wasn’t anyone; I was me.
The last time I lied, a real honest-to-goodness totally pointless lie, was this summer. It was probably July, a few weeks before I moved away from the city Melanie was born in. The move was looming, and really any free time I had should have been spent packing, but instead I went to Home Depot on an impulsive trip to buy some thin copper tubing and make some jewelry out of it.
Once I got there, I was disappointed to find that the tubing I wanted only came in four-foot lengths, not the sections of a few inches long that I wanted. I decided to ask an employee if they cut metal for customers the way they do lumber. A helpful young man named Jermaine kindly agreed, even though it wasn’t technically a service offered. Through no fault of Jermaine’s, the whole process quickly became sort of a train wreck. The cutting device was finicky to operate, and so he got someone else to help him with it as he tried to do other work at the same time, as it had become clear that Jermaine was supposed to be covering another employee’s tasks as well as his own. I was deeply uncomfortable, just an asshole standing around and monopolizing two people’s time for no good reason when I really should have been stacking boxes.
“So what is this for? Some kind of project?” The two men whose day I was derailing tried desperately to make small talk with me, and I heard it happening before I could stop it. I told them I was helping a friend run an event, an event which somehow required these decorative plant hangers made out of metallic tubing and twine. The rest of them were done, I said, but we realized we needed enough materials for just one more. It was a dumb lie, and didn’t really make any sense. I didn’t even really feel relieved when I said it; I just felt like a crazy jerk, which is what I was.
I left Home Depot with a my stupid copper tubing and having told only one more lie, which was that it was fine to not finish cutting the last segment I wanted because I didn’t really need it. I actually did want it, but also would have chewed off my own hand to be able to leave. I left Home Depot just as much of an asshole as I was inside of it. The magic spell didn’t work; never has, really. I didn’t get to become someone else, not even to myself.
I’ve read lots and lots about other liars, people who have ruined their own lives and those of others because of their preoccupation. People who lie about having cancer, people who lie about experiencing hate crimes, people who pretend to be missing children, the works. I always feel a little terror along with the fascination; is that my future? It’s not, I’m pretty sure. The details are too different. First: they are usually lying about major things, the most major, whereas my lies have never been high on the Richter scale. They are usually lying to those closest to them, or to people who become close to them because of their lies; I much prefer lying to strangers. They are usually lying to get things — money, attention, affection — whereas I have never wanted anything in particular, except maybe to be left alone.
More important than those logistics, though, is the truth about why we’re lying. That particular class of liar is usually trying to augment themselves, make some sort of Photoshop edit to an otherwise intact life that will change others’ perception of them. She’s so needy — but she says she has stomach cancer, so. He’s so odd — but he says all these terrible things have happened to him, so. That was never what I wanted. What I wanted was to erase myself entirely. To restart and reboot as someone else, even if only for the space of one conversation with a stranger, even if this new person differed from me only in terms of what flavor of ice cream she preferred. Not to manipulate someone else’s opinion of me, but my own. To know that there were other possible versions of me, and that one of them might be someone I would like.
