Confessions of a Liar

So, it's confession time. While I am sure that most people that follow my scribblings, poetic etchings and stories will not be so fickle to stop subscribing and reading because of this, there is the potential that you might. I have made peace with that.

For my ABCommunities Challenge, I landed on the Confessions community. I did think about ways around actually doing any confessing, because I feel like I never stop confessing things through my writing and my comments and discussions with people.

Then I started thinking about it more seriously.

I do my very best to be a nice person. But, the truth is. Often I am not. Often, I wish that aside from my loved ones, the rest of the world would disappear and give me some peace and quiet. Sometimes on public transport or out and about among other humans, I get those undesirable, intrusive thoughts. I am sure it's normal, especially for someone with mental health issues. Still, they are there. But for now, I am confident I will never act on them.

There was a that one time, when I was younger, when I kicked a girl between the legs. The kick was not so accident, but the location was. This is spoken about at great length, here:

I don't believe in sycophancy, though, to be clear. So, if I have given you a positive comment, I most definitely meant it. Of that you can be sure.

Why am I telling you all this - for some background and context. To show I realise how flawed I am. My arrogance as a writer/poet is sometimes on display in my work and in humorous banter between many of you, but I will be the first to stand up and say how terrible I have been and still can be as a person.

One of my greatest flaws is lying. While it is something I am trying to really work on, it still causes me issues and is still a fallback so many times in my life.

I don't actually like it. I prefer when I can be transparent and open with people, but I avoid it, for so many reasons.

After deciding what this piece was going to be about, I started to think about all the times I've lied and how many I could remember. I am not about to disclose that number, because it's pretty arbitrary at this point. However, I also started to think about why I had lied and the most common reason was fear.

• Fear of being caught doing something I shouldn't
• Fear of people knowing what I was really like
• Fear that the truth would upset and anger people
• Fear that the truth would push people away
• Loss of control and shame fuel my lies, too.

When I was younger, so much younger than I am today. (Sorry, bad time for a silly reference to The Beatles?) When I was younger, I didn't lie a lot, but there are times I remember. Once I got into trouble in class, it was primary school, so I was less than 11 years old and I got sent to the head teacher's office. I was told by the secretary to wait outside. We used to call it the "white wall" because, guess what, it was white. Often, we would be sent there and Mrs Kelly would basically make us sit there, so that tension built as we waited for our punishment to be doled out. Only for her to tell us to get back to class after a half hour wait.

Once I took an eraser from the end of a pencil, tore it off, licked it, and stuck it to my head. Our head teacher had a spot on her forehead that looked like that. Very mature, but very funny at the time. I also got scissors out and made a slight nick on my tie.

When Mrs Kelly eventually called me into her office, she didn't give me the quick send away she normally does. She asked what I did for my teacher to send me to her office.

Now, I had two options that I had to quickly weigh up.

I could have told the truth and said, "Mrs Kelly, I am sorry but I took one of the erasers you get at the end of a pencil, tore it off, licked it and put it on my forehead to mock your disgusting spot that you can't actually do anything about, for laughs."

You see where I am going with this, right?

Or I could make some shit up about "I pulled some silly faces at some of the people in my class"

I thought. Good answer.

"What kind of faces?" she asked.

Damn, why didn't I think this through?

I then pulled the lamest, goofiest faces I could think of.

She looked disappointed in my faces and in my attitude.

So, while my lying didn't really do me favours, and made me look stupid, telling the truth would have been worse. That's how I read the situation in my head anyway.

Plus, anyone who is a keen follower of my writing here (hi, by the way), will know that I had a bad experience once with telling someone something a little too honestly. (I told someone that they couldn't come to my party, in primary school, because I "didn't like them".) The link below includes that and many other things I am not proud of.

So, I had two very good examples, at least I thought, of why it was bad to tell the truth.

I think that fear of what I did to that boy, along with just fear and shame in general, fuelled my lying.

There are lots of things I have lied about over the last few years, particularly since being married.

Thanks a lot to my addiction issues.

I've lied about emotional affairs, lied about porn use, lied about inappropriate chatroom use, lied about lying.

I've lied a lot. Too many times to include even the most heinous all in this article without it becoming more bloated than it already is.

And just like anything you do often, it becomes habit - second nature.

I am not proud and would hope that me writing about it so candidly does not come off that way.

As I said at the outset, I often feel like a terrible human being, because based on my actions I have acted like a terrible human being. And at the centre of it all is the lying.

It is something I am constantly trying to fight against. I still mess up and still find being 100% honest all the time hard. Even though, I know, deep down, it is not that hard. It feels hard.

I have gotten myself into lots of trouble, hurt people I love and disrupted my life immeasurably, and in addition to all the bad things, the wrong turns and rotten paths I've taken, lying has been a driving force for everything.

Writing about my mental health, my past wrongs, and how I’ve hurt my wife—helps. Writing about my addiction issues. Helps. It helps me to face up to my past actions, to think about them, I do a lot of meditating on my past actions anyway, so it goes hand in hand with that as a way of making me take accountability.

I’m still trying to be a better person—still trying not to lie. I still find myself slipping up and lying. But sometimes now I come clean much quicker. Other times, I catch myself before I even lie.

So, that's progress?

I don’t know if I’ll ever be free from this habit, but I have to keep trying—because if I stop, I know where that road leads.

*

Thanks for reading!

Author's Notes: This is for my ongoing ABCommunities Challenge to myself, inspired by Rachel Deeming's similar idea. In which I will write for a different community every week of the year, particularly those that I have never written in before.

Here are other things:

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