“why do people lie? this is why we hate liars.”

How do you explain to someone who holds such hatred against the act of lying that you can’t see what’s so bad about not telling the truth? How do you explain that that’s how you’ve existed all your life, that’s how you’ve gotten through things, how you’ve survived thus far?

How do you explain that it’s something that can’t really be changed unless you change yourself entirely…

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I grew up in a home that refused to believe that it was broken in public. As I was growing up I watched my mom lie about me, my brothers, and my father. I watched my father lie to my mother about his extramarrital affairs. I watched as lies took us places, gave us connections, made my mother famous, made the people of the community suck up to me in desparate attempts to get to know my mother.

In my house nothing came very easily. If I wanted to do something, be able to go somewhere, be able to get away from the house… I had to lie. I had to lie about what kinds of friends I had — even if they weren’t bad friends. I had to lie about where we were going — even if it wasn’t anywhere bad. I had to lie about my boyfriends being my guy friends. Why? Because I knew how much crap that I would go through if I didn’t.

For example, the months where I had a ‘boyfriend’ that my mother knew about were probably the worst in terms of my relationship with my mother in my life. There weren’t two or three days that went by that i didn’t get into a fight with my mom. There weren’t days that went by that I didn’t become so aggravated that going off to college seemed like a blessing. There wasn’t one day that went by that I didn’t wish I could just die to make the verbal abuse end.

I should have lied.

I even once lied my way out of a mental hospital.

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Someone once said in my blog that we can always retract a lie, but never can we retract the truth. It’s always there — once you tell the truth, what more is there to say? I agree with this person…

…But I still know that lying is wrong. I know that there have been times when I should have told the truth when I didn’t. At the same time, though, there are still times that I remember that lying was so crucial to my survival, or that I should have lied, that I can’t really say that I believe that I will stop lying completely.

I can try my hardest… I can go into therapy… I can change who I am… But how can I change what I’ve seen in the past?