Lying...

It is a long story how my love affair with lying started, which you can read in my book (which will be coming out this fall) but for now, let’s just say I had good reason to lie in the beginning.  It was the methodology to keep me moving forward, alive and “normal.”  I mean, as close to normal as I have ever been.

I started lying in the beginning to keep myself and others safe.  To keep secrets and allow the status quo, or so it appeared to, to remain.  So lying was a protection, not so much for cover for bad things I was doing, I wasn’t really doing anything all that bad.  But to keep my life private and mine.  I lied in the beginning to have peace and space that was just mine.  I didn’t want you to know how I really felt, thought or the like.  I lied to keep you out.

Then I learned that life is going to ask you a lot of the time to lie to make others feel better, or not feel worse.  I learned to lie to protect other people’s feelings also.  I learned to lie in order to suppress my own happiness so that you wouldn’t feel badly, or jealous, or less than, or whatever.  I learned at a young age that there was an acceptable range for success, popularity and shit like that and if you moved beyond what others felt was your limit, well, you were fucked.  Gossip, rumormongering, out right lies about who you were and what you did.  I do not think I ever got over that one time in 5th grade when this girl that was supposed to be my friend, convinced me to wear eyeliner to school (she was supposed to do it too, but of course, she didn’t) and so I was the only one that showed up wearing the 1980s requisite blue eyeliner, and then that very same girl led the charge on “what a slut Erin is.”

It was so unfair.  It was so hurtful.  It was so targeting.  It was so fucking awful.  It would be years before I even kissed a boy, like 4, and even longer before I had any kind of sex, like 7, but yet, on that day I became the biggest slut of Waynewood Elementary school.

That particular girl was quite good at teaching horrible lessons that you never wanted to learn.  Until today, I haven’t thought about her in years.  And now I kind want to look her up and hold her accountable for her shit behavior in 1979.  But I will not.  I let her take way too much from me already.  Not going to do that anymore, instead, I bring her up here because situations like that became commonplace over the next 4 years.  An indoctrination of me being less than, and if I tried, even a little, to come into my own, I was put in check and place immediately.  I am not sure if this is just my experience or perhaps this is every girl’s lot in life.  I just know it sucked and it had far lasting repercussions.  I wouldn’t have a girlfriend that I trusted for about 20 years.  It took a long time to heal that wound, and I would love to say that my horrible female relationships were limited to 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade, but that would be a lie.  And I have really been working on the whole lying thing for the past 31 years.

Anyway, my whole point in this blog today is to own that lying becomes it own kind of comfort and reward.  You tell the lies you need to tell to protect yourself and then you are rewarded for telling lies to protect others.  And it becomes a way of life.  And for me, it became a foundational living requirement for me.  I made a decision to never let anyone know what I truly thought and believed or felt.  And once that was decided and then practiced it became a very hard thing to stop doing.  It became all wrapped up in who I was and how I was in the world.  It felt like my personal survival required it.  And I suppose at some points in time, it really did.

But for the last 31 years, I have been trying to not lie.  Show up as myself even if that means you are going to malign me, hate me, talk shit about me, or actively try to bring me in line to whatever you might think is the right size of me.  And so when I say it has taken a lot of courage to write this blog, owning my lesser parts and equally terrifying, the greater parts.  Putting myself out here every day has become this very healing, but completely terrifying task that I seem to now need to do every single day.  My writing is not always good, but somedays, I write a sentence or paragraph and think, “fuck if that isn’t the truest thing I have ever felt...”  I am not sure why I need this public forum to find myself, I just know that I do.  I know that I cannot keep all of me on lock down anymore.  I need to be me, boldly, completely and earnestly, all day, every day. And this is the place I do that.

And the lying has abated.  I can tell you the truth.  I still do not like it.  I am often 10 years old again and terrified, but I know that lying to protect myself or you, is just paying on an installment plan of loss.  The loss is coming, it can come now and be done, or I can prolong all of our agony for longer, by kicking the can of lies down the street...

I guess what I have learned is that lying is always going to feel like the safer option to me.  And sometimes it is the only path I can take.  But I have also learned that if I lie, I can go back and own it and repair it.  And a great deal of the time, even though I want to lie, I can move myself through that feeling and tell the truth anyway.  And I will also tell you that those time I succeed in letting you into how I feel, what I want, what I think, when everything in me wants to tell you a convenient, believable lie, are some of the bravest moments of my life...

Again, still...