why not lie?
If resentment is a poison that you drink hoping it will kill someone else, a lie is a hand grenade that someone throws into the center of your being and when it goes off they can walk away.
I mean, would you really want them sticking around to look at the damage or help clean up the wreckage? This person you trusted wasn’t a person and wasn’t trustworthy. The person you thought you knew was only a sliver of a person, the part that wasn’t being hidden, a coward hiding behind a falsehood to manipulate you into choices you wouldn’t have otherwise made.
There are several levels of reality a lie decimates.
The person you trusted was not who you thought they were. Clearly you thought they were someone you could trust and you were wrong. You thought they had integrity and they did not. You thought they valued your connection, your pride, your mental health, your perception and worldview, but they valued what they could gain with no consideration for what it would cost you.
What they told you wasn’t true - if it was only one thing it doesn’t matter, everything is now in question. The things they said are impossible to reconcile with the lie. While nothing is black and white, it’s impossible to be both things at once.
Your memories are gone. Gone would be more merciful, instead they are fundamentally changed in real time as they are recalled. The thread of the falsehood runs through everything that happened, everything that was said.
You are not who you thought you were. You believed you were loved and valued, that you were a person who had, among all the options, chosen a good person to share your body, time, and life with.
You thought you were safe and you weren’t. The most dangerous thing in your life was sleeping next to you, holding your hand, staring in your eyes and accepting love that they know you never would have given if you knew the truth.
A lie violates you.
It invalidates you.
It undermines you.
Unless you fight like hell, it can define you.
And what does it do to the other person?
They might feel guilt.
Perhaps the pain of losing you.
They are aware they have caused you pain, but it’s theoretical, they don’t have to face it, to watch the fire they lit burn and spread, to help put it out, to walk through the burn scar.
You have been manipulated, your reality has been toyed with, as if you were an inanimate object to be used while you were useful.
The worst part is what happens in your most important relationship: the one you have with yourself. Your friends will say it isn’t your fault, you trusted someone and that’s a good thing, you can’t know until you know. They will tell you the lie is the responsibility and karma of the liar, but your brain doesn’t buy it.
It is your brain’s job to protect you, detect threats, make good choices, bail before the bomb drops. Your brain failed. That is painful and shameful enough, but the worst is yet to come. The brain has to regain its position, rectify past mistakes, prevent it from ever happening again.
You will feel stupid.
You will blame yourself.
You will run through everything that happened, everything that was said dragging the lie from a rope around your neck as it decays, the stench punishment for what you must have been able to see but clearly missed.
You will blame yourself for not seeing.
You will blame yourself for not believing what you did see and allowed them to explain away, talk you out of, convince you this rare and accurate insight was a projection of your past and all in your head.
You will batter yourself with hindsight, seeing everything that was wrong, that you forgave, let slide, compromised on, graces you gave them, reasons you should have left and would have if you knew the truth.
If you knew the truth you would have left immediately and they knew that.
If you knew the truth you would have been spared all the fights, the disappointments, the shortness and slights.
You would have been spared the mediocre sex, the nights of TV because he was too lazy to leave the house, too busy and poor, and too uncreative to plan a date.
If you knew the truth you wouldn’t have given away that time.
That time
That time
That time
That time
You can’t get it back. You lost it. It’s gone.
Except you didn’t lose it.
It was stolen from you.
Stolen from you.
Stolen by someone who knows you never would have given it unless they hid the truth from you.
And that’s the thing about liars. They are selfish. They are cowards. If love involves sacrifice, the liar evades that by clouding the eyes of the people they are using, taking with both hands and leaving others to pay their debts.
He valued you enough to pursue you, convinced you to move for him, introduced to his family, share his home, meet his friend. Except he didn’t. He paraded you around like a prize pony wearing blinders.
Now that the truth is out - assuming he is being honest with anyone in his life about why you cut him off completely, they see what he really thought of you. You were a bookmark, a placeholder, someone base enough to manipulate, to trick into filling a hole the woman he truly valued would eventually take back.
Everyone will know what a fool you were.
Everyone will know what he really thought of you, how he used you, tricked you, discarded you.
What I appreciate about being raped, which is something I never thought I’d say, is how fast it was. What is 15 minutes, an hour, compared to a year? And these were men you didn’t know well, didn’t trust. These mistakes were small in hindsight.
These are all things I think. How do I feel? Thank you for asking. I feel like I’m being turned inside out. Sometimes a vat of acid lands on my skin & it sizzles as it burns through my flesh down to the bone. A cannonball blasts through my chest, tearing me apart.
The hurt is lodged in the bottom of my ribcage into my gut. When I want relief I fantasize about a shot gun pressed into the bottom of my ribcage, pressed against my gut. I feel the resounding blow of it going off, the pain of it tearing through me, the relief of the empty silence as its echo fades. This is what I think of as a vacation.
I recall a medieval torture device I saw in a museum, a standing coffin filled with spikes. That is what it’s like in my mind. An Iron Maiden of memories, and at the tip of each spike is an electric shock as every sweet moment of you transforms into what it always was, a mask, an illusion, a million untruths, and me, deceived.