![]() ![]() I swapped every main character out for myself and lived within the pages.Īnd then the stories became a living tapestry for me, materials to cloak my life in. Even though they weren’t about me, I saw myself in them. So once I learned how to read, I lost myself in books, the stories within them more real to me - and more appealing - than my “reality” of unwell mom and barely-there dad. ![]() My mom had been in and out of mental health hospitals for much of my childhood, and my workaholic dad felt like a benign shadow more than a bonafide parent. ![]() That’s lying ! Fiction versus real life: the line gets blurredĪs I got older, I guess I blurred the line between lying and storytelling. You can’t just make things up, I told myself then. She didn’t “come up with” the story of the little girl who couldn’t find her socks and while hunting for them found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, she had lived that…she must’ve been that little girl once, searching for her missing socks in the tall grass. I remember the teacher asking the writer how she came up with her ideas, and that struck me as very wrong. Not just any author, but the woman who wrote the book the class had loved, the one the teacher had been reading us during storytime for months. Maybe I was six or seven, in elementary school anyway, and one time the teacher brought in an author to speak to us. I was a young kid when it really hit me: it’s okay to make things up. Jay’s story: Notes from a pathological liar Although it’s written by me, it’s informed by my years working with clients struggling with compulsive lying. What follows is a chronic liar telling his story. They’re often referred to as “pathological liars” or “compulsive liars.” These individuals often appear helpless in their inability to be truthful. However, there are those who seem unable to go through their lives without consistent patterns of deceiving others. Therefore, they don’t necessarily require much (if any) self-examination. These lies, however, are often transitory moments that do not define who we are and how we relate to others in general. Whether it’s to make ourselves look better or cover up an embarrassing fact (or even to avoid hurting someone else’s feelings), I’d say with a high degree of confidence that no one has avoided telling a lie at one point or another in their lives. According to Webster’s Dictionary, a lie is “an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” Obviously we all can relate to telling a lie. ![]()
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