Only Human

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Dedicated to Tiffany, She made a difference in my life and she opened herself up to me and as much as I told myself don’t screw this up, I couldn’t help myself and I screwed it all up. Begging and hoping for forgiveness is all I can do now.

Being a compulsive liar isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You create lies that affect the way you live, how you react toward certain people, the emotions you portray on a regular basis and knowing that you can never tell your family members the lies you tell everyone else in order to keep your fantasy a reality. Trust me; it’s harder than it sounds.

You don’t just wake up one day and say, “Hey, I’m going to start being a compulsive liar today just for the heck of it.” It’s a serious problem. Being a compulsive liar starts young. Usually in children or early teens that have the normal life. But to them, it’s not enough. There’s no drama or excitement, it’s not another Hollywood movie.

When you create a fantasy or lie, you get it from the television or books or based off another persons life. In my case, in elementary school I saw on the news a woman who had a heart attack in a movie theater. I went to school, normally, happy. It was a regular Monday morning and we were to write about our weekend in our journals. Nothing exciting happened over my weekend but I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who had a heart attack in the movie theater. I wrote that I had gone to see a movie with family. Lie number one. I had in fact seen a movie, with my parents and older brother in the family room on the couch. Again, the woman came to mind. Lie number two; I wrote that my grandmother was the woman who had the heart attack in the movie theater.

Of course, as any teacher, they go around reading entries. When the teacher came to my desk and read she asked how my grandmother was doing. I told her not very well. Lie number three. But in all likelihoods, you always get caught in these situations. After school, my teacher called my mother at work and asked how my grandmother was doing. I was caught.

Lying about a lie comes naturally. It’s instinct. You’ve been caught, so what do you do? Lie. You lie to get yourself out of the lie you created. Digging yourself a deeper hole and hooking you in. Lying is addictive. Once you’ve started, there’s no going back. Of course, my mother knew more than I thought and caught me on lie number four. I lied four times and got myself grounded instead of just saying that nothing happened over my weekend. But how dramatic would that be? How Hollywood cliché would it be? Where’s the excitement?

Simple lies like that are slaps on the butt. When you get deeper in, when it starts to effect how you act around your friends and you act differently toward your family and totally opposite to the one person you’re supposed to be completely honest with, when the reality you’ve created for yourself and the reality of the world you’re living collide, the collision is such an ugly sound.

You’ve moved on from the movie theater heart attack and you want something better, something longer lasting. Something you can totally wing. Where you were born and raised. A place you’ve visited and enjoyed. A place you dream of or just some random place in the middle of the dessert. Whatever satisfies the liar. Boulder, Colorado is the place I told practically everyone that I knew I had been born there. That I lived on a huge ranch with horses and chickens and cows, the stereo typed farm. That I was there until I was five. A vague description, bendable to the next victim it falls into the hands of.

In this case, it was a friend. A good one. One that I was just getting know better. I told her that I lived on a farm and she said how she loved the country, especially the country boys, ones in the military too. What a better way to manipulate a lie than to tell her that I was practically an army brat. That most of my friend’s fathers were in the military. That I help at least half of them with the bad letters and the missing in action notices and the dead in action notices. That it felt like I was one until I moved to Freedom, Oklahoma. A small, well kept town where my grandfather grew up on a farm. Where my grandparents raised me and my brother. Where everyone went to church and everyone knew everyone. And being an Atheist, I decided to stop going to church in Freedom. Exiled. What a better way to top a perfectly executed lie with an; “I’m not supposed to go back to Freedom. They don’t want me, but why should I want to go back to them? I don’t want to believe in God.”

Then you get into the physical and mental disabilities of the compulsive liar(s). A simple learning disability can easily be molded into legally mentally retarded, anything is possible. And everything happens.

When it comes to lying about a mental disability at school it’s best not to get too complicated. And this isn’t a manual on how to go around lying about everything because it always comes back to get you. For instance, here was my situation:

I was brutally beaten by my drunken, cigarette smoking father who used me, a blonde, blue eyed four year to lure in money from relatives at my aunt’s funeral. That my brother was never there for me because whenever he stood up for me he was beaten too. That at an early age in Boulder, I was told that I was mentally retarded. When we lived on our farm, I was learning to ride horses and all my friends older brothers or fathers were in the military and many of them never came home and I was always there to console my friends. That my parents divorced once when my mother found out that he was having an affair with my brother’s third grade teacher. During the split, my mother sent us to live with our grandparents in Freedom. That I was forced to go to church when it was against my own five year old beliefs. That I was exiled from the town for refusing to go to church. That when I was ten, my parents came back, happily remarried to move us to San Diego. That my father still beat me until I was twelve and he was still a drunk and smoked. My parents fought almost every night. They divorced again and I learned that when I was twelve, I was bisexual. That I had a girlfriend who died the summer or 2007 and it made me cut myself while my parents were in the midst of a divorce and once it was final, I tried to kill myself. My parents thought it’d be a better, structured house hold if they remarried and we became a happy family again. I hated my father and was unhappy with my mother for doing nothing when my father beat me. That they fought almost every night and my dad would leave almost every night and my mom would get wasted and pass out and I’d have to drag her to bed. That I was always depressed and constantly thought about suicide.

My lies were complicated. I couldn’t just wake up the next morning and text the person I had told them to the night before that I was just kidding around, that none of it happened. I got so caught up in my lies that I believed them. I believed that the stories I was telling her were true.

When I finally wanted to come clean, I couldn’t. I couldn’t have just told her that I everything I had told her was a lie. That none of it happened but the emotion behind them was truthful. That in a way my lies were true and the person that wasn’t me was in a way, me. I couldn’t say I’m sorry because I was too late. Because she had decided to never speak to me again. And it wasn’t until I had said things to my best friend Ethan, who was trying to make me happier after losing a friend. And the craziest thing of all, I thought that I had done nothing wrong to deserve what she was doing to me.

But then it hit me. It hit me that I had been lying to this girl all along. That I didn’t even deserve the time of day from her. Because she had be truthful. She had told me what really happened in her past, that she had a real reason to be upset, to cry at night. But she is strong and could withstand what had never happened to me that I was letting destroy me. And the entire time Ethan was trying to cheer me up, I was breaking myself down until I exploded and I wrote this to him:

“I’m hurting right now. I’ve lied to a lot of people and I don’t know how to get out of my lies without hurting everyone around me. And everyone is taking life like some fucking joke and that their life is just so horrible from someone else’s and no one really knows if they’re right or not and they don’t fucking care. They don’t care that what they do may hurt someone close to them. That by faking your way through everything is a horrible idea. That when you care about someone and they break your fucking heart it doesn’t matter how much you make fun of them or try not to think about them or dream about them, they’re on your mind non-fucking stop and there’s nothing you can fucking do about it! And Tiffany is an amazing person. She has trust issues. She knew that I trusted her fully and she thought that I expected her to and I don’t/didn’t. But she was scared and afraid that I’d take everything she said and use it against her or use it to try and get closer to her. She thought that the only reason I was hanging around was because I thought I had any chance with her. She didn’t know that I never chose to fall for her, it just happened. And that never did I talk to her because I loved her but because I was her friend. And no matter how much I said that. She couldn’t trust me. And I don’t blame her. Everything I told her was a lie. Only the emotion was real. Because vie lied to everyone. You, Ms. Mattison, Sam, Elizabeth, Becky, everyone. And no one knows the real me because I hide so deep within myself that I just want to see who cares enough to find me."

I had broken down. I had exploded at the one person who was there for me not matter what. I had confessed to him my lies and he forgave me. He accepted me the way I really was, for the person I really am.

I only hope now that the people I’ve hurt can forgive me. And that Tiffany can forgive me and so can Becky. That these two people are really the people who made me come clean. They made me want to forgive myself and hope that everyone else can. And they too, can finally forgive me.

“Hope is all I really need to wash my selfishness and greed. But there’s no hope to be found. No, I’ve looked all around. And if this life that I’ve led only leads to tears in bed then I won’t hang around. No, I won’t hang around. And now I’ve come to conclusions that I’m empty. Well, I thought I still had everything in me.” And Then I Turned Seven – “Distant and Faded

“Keep you in the dark, you know they all pretend. Keep you in the dark. And so it all began. Send in your skeletons, sing as their bones go marching in again. They need you buried deep, the secrets that you keep are ever ready. Are you ready? I'm finished making sense, done pleading ignorance, that whole defense.” Foo Fighters – The Pretender

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