LIES

I'll never forget the first time a boyfriend lied to me.  Or I suppose I should say, the first time I realized a boyfriend had lied to me.  I think I would have preferred he take a very real, very sharp knife and literally slice directly into my gut with it then twist it around and around and back and forth until my intestines all spilled onto the ground and I bled to death.  That would have felt better, I think, than the emotional agony I experienced as a result of his lie.  So why would someone DO something like that?


Don't get me wrong - I think I understand the motivation behind lies.  I've been personally guilty of  concocting way more lies than I care to admit, even to myself, so I know that telling a lie is a truly selfish, immature, cowardly way of avoiding a problem that I myself have caused.  But as I've grown up, I've learned to embrace a set of values that dictate not that I can no longer lie, but that I can longer DO those things about which I would HAVE to lie.  Whether someone is looking or not, I just can't be that person anymore.  I couldn't live with my children knowing that I did the kind of bad things I teach them not to do.  I couldn't respect myself if my students knew I did things that demonstrated an utter LACK of self respect.  Sure, I could fool myself into thinking that I'd never get caught.  How would my kids know if I lied to a friend?  How would my students know if I got drunk at a bar in Chicago and had a one night stand with some random guy whose name I didn't bother to learn?  They probably wouldn't.  But I would.  And I don't want to be that person.

When that same boyfriend I mentioned earlier finally told me the TRUTH about something pretty hideously hurtful, I was amazed to realize that I had been right all along - - I really did want to know the truth, no matter how bad it was.  I can still hear his voice as he callously admitted that he wanted to sleep with someone else.  And I can still feel the relief that washed over me at that moment, like a warm, comforting bath, washing away the pain the prior lies had caused.  No - I wouldn't rather have remained in the dark, clueless as to his extracurricular activities.  No - it didn't feel better to hear him claim his undying love for me and his wish to work things out in our relationship.  I felt horribly burdened by some invisible force that kept pressing hard against my head and my heart.  I knew it was a lie!  And the truth really does set you free.  Trust me - it's definitely not fun to realize your boyfriend wants to or has already slept with someone else, but it's soooooooo much better than knowing deep down at a cellular level that something is wrong (and women always know -- we feel it all the way through to the very nuclei of our cells!) and having him DENY IT.

You can DEAL with the truth.  When he says there's nothing wrong, there's NOTHING you can do!  And being completely powerless is an equally horrible feeling.

So you'd think with all this experience I have with major lies that I'd be immune to the power of smaller, ridiculously pointless lies.  But nope.  Those lies still hurt like hell, too.

If you're going to stay somewhere later than you said you were going to, why not just TELL ME?  Who the hell cares if you linger and have a beer before you show up to do what you told me you were going to do for me, as long as you respect me enough to be honest with me?!?  But lie to me - concoct some ridiculous story about how the job took sooooo much longer than you thought it would and you came right over immediately afterward, even though I can TELL you've been drinking, and now I think you're a complete jerk for having zero work ethic - and zero concern for how you make ME feel.  If I meant anything to you at all, you would trust me with the truth - you would respect me with the truth - you would never consider telling me anything except the truth.

But that's the thing about liars.  They only care about how THEY feel.

I know this.  And I know the lies aren't personal.  But when you're the victim of the lie - and you suddenly realize that your reality has completely shifted and you don't even know what that reality is because you have no idea how many lies there really are - how can it not FEEL personal?

And when you've made truly significant choices based on those lies - when you believed they were truth - how do you recover from the pain of knowing that you were duped?  How do you recover the trust?

THAT is what the liars don't realize - and don't care about.  The thing about liars is that they're REALLY good at lying to themselves, too.  So even if they lose you, they never believe it's their fault.  Hell, they don't even believe it matters to have lost you!  They lie to themselves so that they can move on and maintain their own happiness safe within their little fantasy world, and they don't give another single thought to whether you're still lying there in agony, surrounded by the ever growing pool of blood seeping from the wounds they've inflicted upon you with their lies.

Thank God the wounds don't have to be fatal, if we don't let them.  It might be a slow, difficult process, but we can sew ourselves up and begin to heal.  If we tend to ourselves carefully enough, we might even be able to avoid scars - - or at least make sure they fade considerably.

The danger is in allowing the liar to come back and rip the wounds wide open again.  It would be pretty stupid to do THAT.  And trust me - - that is exactly what will happen if you let a liar come back.

I should know.

:o(


But yes - there MUST be a fabulous aspect to all of this, right?  And there is.

There is the knowledge that I'm strong enough to drag myself back up again, no matter how many times I've been pushed down.  There is the beautiful circle of friends and family and my children to whom I can turn for support and love and fun.  And there is the knowledge that no matter what I thought I knew or what someone else actually did, it is in the past, and I have infallible knowledge of my current reality - and I can make it whatever I want it to be.  I can rely on myself - my own truth - and I can look in the mirror knowing that I am making the right choices for the right reasons - - and even those choices I might have made in the past, albeit they were based on lies, can't be all that bad if they led me to where I am right now. :o)

The liar may choose to continue to lie, but I can choose not to listen anymore.