Posted December 14, 2008, 1:27 pm

Lying and Writing, and Really.

I was a compulsive liar when I was little.

There’s a very clear memory I have, which is kind of an oddity in itself, of preparing to lie to my mom. I’m sitting on the back stairs that lead toward the kitchen from the second floor of our old house in New Jersey. I can’t remember how old I was, or what I felt I needed to lie about, but I can remember how I went about crafting my forgery.

I imagined I was watching a movie of the lie unfolding. I could see myself lying to my mom in different ways, and her responding with varying credulousness. I imagined alternate ways to frame the lie, and multiple methods of delivery. I even went so far as to try to guess the phrasing of her responses. I would try to discover the most realistic and graceful way of pulling one over, the way of lying that most resembled “the way things really happen”.

(This is one of my earliest memories of the idea of an impassable division between myself and the rest of the world. While I was certain that I had free will {or that at least from my perspective it was a fitting idea} I was sure that everything else in the world happened the way it did just because that’s how things happen. Sure, everyone else experienced the same sensations of free will and choice, but however they acted still fit into my understanding of the way things work.)

Yet despite many moments spent perfecting my spurious parlance, my lies often fell through to the truth. Their success and failure seemed to be determined more often than not by their size, and not by my own crafting. That’s probably not true, I was probably a bad liar too.

Ultimately it seems to have been a harmless habit, as I find myself now to be relatively well adjusted, and for the most part honest. At least, I’ve found a lot more value in sincerity since my early-teen years.

The one valuable thing I got out of trying to con so often was a taste for rolling words over in my mouth. How do you say… what’s the best way to express this idea? Hunting for the right word or the most elegant phrasing of an idea. I think this kind of habitual flexing and articulating of words is why I like to write, even if it’s for little more than my own pleasure.

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