lie no. 23 | 07.09.19

I’d seen Florence + The Machine perform live previously, long before Hurricane Florence was even a glimmer in Mother Nature’s eye. Six years earlier—almost to the very day of the show that lured me back home after the storm last fall—I had danced in the early autumn heat to her songs with a group of girlfriends. 

Able to hire a car and pack a picture-perfect picnic at the eleventh hour, yet unable to purchase seats together, we had to sit in pairs. Merriweather Post Pavilion: my modern-day Noah’s Arc. I’m sure I didn’t speak up and actually ask for it, but fortunately I got paired up with the only girlfriend in the bunch who I’d opened up to at the time about what was brewing back home.

I didn’t know enough about Florence to be a huge fan of her music back then. I was more a fan of any opportunity to pretend I was a normal twenty-something—dark amphitheaters and distractingly loud live music tend to make that tall task easier, at least until the show ended and the flood lights came back on. I was more a huge I-miss-close-human-connection-something-fierce-but-am-buried-under-a-secret-cutting-off-my-air-supply-stripping-me-of-my-voice-and-my-vulnerability-and-afraid-I’ll-never-feel-it-again-so-concerts-are-a-safe-space-to-pretend kind of girl. What’s more normal than that? 

[Editor’s note to any twenty-somethings reading this: EVERYTHING. Everything is normal about that. Save yourself the trouble of trying to be normal all the damn time and stick to being the most insanely interesting person you actually are.]

That night gifted me the most requisite of respites—between the day my mother found out about my father’s affair and the day I told her the truth about how I’d known about it for years—and gave my younger self an opportunity to dance with reckless abandon and joy and ever-so briefly feel safe. (I cannot, however, say the same for the older couple fortunate enough to sit next to me on the arc that night—suffice to say the seas were a bit rough and they may have ended up a little damper than desired, my cup continuing to runneth over to every rhythm of the redhead rocking on stage… perhaps they should learn to go with the Flo, but I digress.)

One of my most vivid memories from that night is when Florence started singing Dog Days. I danced—or jumped, or splashed, depending on who you ask as the lyrics “Run fast for your mother run fast for your father... Leave all your love and your longing behind you; Can't carry it with you if you want to survive,” catapulted from the sound system.

I’d run for my father for so long and the next day I’d be running for my mother, my own Tell The Truth Day looming nearer with every note.

I remember going into that night so afraid of what my worn-down mind might allow to come out of my wild mouth. So, so desperate for a break, my fear outweighed only by a desire to hit pause, if only for a moment, or, perhaps more appropriately here, if only for a night.

It’s an odd position to be in: one I’d begged to hurry up and get to while simultaneously using all my strength to keep it at bay for years—stuck in a perfect purgatory between what was and what would never again be.

A funny, or I suppose quite sad, thing happens when we feign belief, for even the faintest wrinkles in time, that we’ll be able to breathe again once the truth comes out. We learn the truth’s not all it’s chalked up to be. My eyes locked in on that inevitable moment of truth like a finish line, believing once I reached it, I’d finally be able to catch my breath once again—surely it, my breath, would be waiting patiently for me there, like a participation medal I could proudly drape around my neck.

Except that’s nothing like what happened, at least for me. Maybe the truth does set you free eventually, but it sure as shit doesn’t take back all the years you lied to so many people. I felt no freer once my mother knew the truth than I had before. I’d forgotten, or somehow blocked it out, over time that this wasn’t simply some inside joke I could finally fill everyone else in on, some game we could clear the board of to play again, everyone back at Go.

Just because I’d rolled the dice and finally gotten out of jail, passed Go and collected my $200 did not mean anyone else playing this high-stakes game of Lieopoly got to join my victory dance, got to taste the same freedom as me. That’s not how this game works unfortunately. Suddenly everyone else was in the jail I’d been freed from. Myself moving ahead from one corner of solitude to another, left with only empty hotels.

So, no, the truth won’t always set you free. Anything with always, or never, in front of it is probably a lie—at least at first. 

Sunday, hilariously, was National Tell The Truth Day. After an embarrassing amount of thought, I decided to sit it out.

Here’s why: Everybody lies. Anyone who says otherwise is, well, lying. I’m not sure we need one day a year, another fake internet holiday, to come clean. No one would do so anyway, at least not completely.

As kids we’re taught lying is wrong and telling the truth is right. As teenagers we learn to lie or omit the truth to stay out of trouble. As adults we get so good at it, we stop paying attention or caring enough—simply far too busy or important—to even distinguish between the two anymore. 

Unfortunately, that’s when we tend to get good at lying to ourselves. We do it gradually at first, testing the accuracy of our own lie detectors, until it eventually becomes second nature—an easy thing to do when the test’s administrator is asleep on the job, or too busy to pay attention.

Herein lies the duality of deception: Lying gets us into trouble, and lying keeps us out of trouble. Lying causes pain, and lying prevents pain. Lying is lazy, and lying is laborious. Lying is hurtful, and lying is kind.

What I often forget is that only when we believe a lie to be true does it become dangerous. It’s like an internal, built-in two-factor authentication: We can lie all we want, but not until we begin to believe it do we grant our lies access to the places our truths reside.

We give a lie life when we breathe belief into it.

Sure, lying is a choice, but so is believing it. There’s massive comfort—and massive responsibility—in that.

Don’t get it twisted: I still tell lies, to myself and pretty much everyone and everything around me.

Here’s a sampling of my greatest hits in regular rotation:

I’m fine.

Everything’s great.

Nothing’s wrong.

No, I’m not mad.

I’ve been really busy.

It must’ve gone to spam.

It was on sale.

It’s delicious.

Just one glass a night, with dinner.

Yes, I have read the terms and conditions.

Coming clean in therapy didn’t cleanse me entirely, and I’m not sure I’d even want that. Truth be told, my honesty has arguably gotten me into more trouble in the past year or so than my industrial-strength filters ever have. And that’s OK!

What I have found on this little truth-telling trip of mine is this: There’s enormous power in paying attention to the lies I do still choose to tell and the far sneakier ones: the things I omit, the things I leave out and the things I underrepresent or embellish. For me, it’s the lies I don’t tell that tend to be as brutal, if not more so, than the ones I do. 

Sometimes it’s simply easier to lie. Sometimes I lie as a way to build boundaries. Sometimes I lie because I don’t want to believe the truth, and sometimes I lie because I’m not ready to admit it. Again, all OK!

I’m learning that as long as I’m as honest as I can possibly be with myself, without judgment, as long as I’m quietly willing to acknowledge a lie (or an omission or an embellishment) for what it is, as long as I silently call myself out on it and as long as I trust myself to hold onto it for however long I need—it gets easier to trust or to believe, not the lie, but myself. It gets easier to choose myself over the lies.

That night last fall I heard every lyric differently than I did the first time. When Florence sang, “it’s always darkest before the dawn,” I believed it.

The lyrics and notes, like threads woven into fabric, remain unchanged over time. It’s our experiences that change how we hear it, how we see it, how we assign meaning to it over time. Florence helped me start to see that last fall, both of them.

I didn’t see it at the time, but my own dawn was on the horizon. A search for meaning I didn’t know I was looking for was about to take me on the trip of a lifetime.

First stop: Hong Kong.

It started as a mileage run, a whirlwind 48-hour trip, to keep my elite status on American Airlines, lest (gasp!) I lose such a key marker of my identity! In the end it kickstarted a search for who I really am.

I wrote Lie No. 14 on the return flight. Too excited to sleep, and not yet aware I’d just stumbled on what would become an important piece of the puzzle I didn’t know I’d set out to solve.

The following month, I checked into a hotel in San Miguel de Allende—the third and final leg of a trip to celebrate my 35th birthday. I’d spent the last eight nights in Mexico—the first half with Matt on Isla Holbox and the second with strangers-turned-friends in Mexico City.

The phone in my hotel room started ringing before I’d put my bag down, the door not yet closed completely. Maybe it’s Matt calling to make sure I survived that three-and-a-half-hour drive in the backseat of a car which may or may not have been a professional car service, I thought.

“Hello?” I said, suddenly too distracted to answer in Spanish by my sudden realization I wasn’t sure Matt even knew where I was staying.

“Creo,” the man on the other end of the line said.

“Habla inglés?” I asked, annoyed, again without thinking, having just ended a delightful conversation in English with the hotel’s bellman who delivered my bags to my room.

Shit, I thought, as I realized my potential mistake. I’m not a nervous traveler by any stretch of the imagination, I fancy myself more of a smart traveler—you know, not the kind to advertise being an American woman traveling abroad and alone. Not to mention the kind with a degree in Spanish, which would’ve come in handy in this moment if only it didn’t frustratingly prefer to pipe up in places like France and Italy over actual Spanish-speaking ones.

“Creo,” the man said again in the same spine-tinglingly calm voice as before.

I said nothing, not yet making anything of it but really hoping he’d complete his thought here soon.

“Creo,” he said, somehow more soothingly and steadily spoken than the first two times.

I panicked and hung up. I fled my room, leaving behind nearly everything I’d brought with me. And then things got interesting.

The tide always turns, sometimes even on a mountain in Mexico.