A Clockwork Mind

Isolation

It was a bright, brisk November afternoon and I had just broken up with my girlfriend of two years. I remember we had met in the afternoon to discuss the future of our relationship, and I remember the sunny day, but for some reason I have this idea that it was dark out as I was driving home. Who broke up with who was also a complicated matter of perspective, she was the one with the grievance but I was the one who had definitively made the call to end it.

The heart of the matter was that for some reason I wasn?t able to tell her anything true about myself and my situation. Several weeks previously she noticed that I still had a cavity that I had said was filled, and the resulting question and answer exercise quickly escalated out of control. We tried to work through the lies and move on, but since I wasn?t able to stop telling them we broke up.

I wasn?t as devastated by the breakup as she was. While I was sad, I had speculated about the possibilities of what would happen when (not if) she eventually discovered my lies and breaking up had been the most likely scenario in my mind for a while. Lying also had the effect of insulating myself from her affection. I loved her, but because I constructed a fraudulent persona and given her that to love, I had difficulty experiencing it in return even though I knew it was there. The combination numbed me to the immediate emotions around breaking up with someone.

Something else that helped the breakup go easier for me in the short term despite its long term consequences was that my girlfriend tried to use anger to motivate me. She was understandably very hurt by my lies, which expressed itself in a variety of venomous statements. However, she also tried to push me into action by shaming me. This was not an effective strategy. I already felt a tremendous amount of guilt and shame about myself, and those emotions made me want to crawl into a hole and die rather than inspire me to take action. Piling on the guilt might work in the short term to spur me into action if I just wanted to make the words stop, but only made helping myself more difficult in the long run.

What really ate at me was the fact that I couldn?t stop lying even when I wanted to, which I only discovered when I started trying to tell the truth. It was an automatic behavior that I practiced with everyone, even in situations where lying seemed completely unnecessary. If someone asked me what I had for breakfast and I had a poptart, I would probably tell them that I had oatmeal without thinking.

My lies were not limited to banal subjects either. I deceived everyone about everything. Major issues that I was lying to everyone about included, but were not limited to, the fact that I was failing college, my car was on the verge of breaking down, I was out of money, had an outstanding traffic ticket, my teeth were full of cavities, and I seemed incapable of helping myself by enrolling in free government aid programs--or helping myself in any way, for that matter. It was pretty bad. I placed special emphasis on hiding my situation from my family.

Familiar thoughts about myself stewed in my brain on the way home. There were the general ones, of course: I was worthless, evil, moronic, pathetic, doomed, and so on. Talking with my girlfriend and trying to work through my issues had brought one in particular into the limelight: What the hell was wrong with me? I didn?t have an answer. While I was able to identify the time and events around when I began lying, that wasn?t a satisfactory reason for why I was lying in the present for my girlfriend, or for myself.

I think I began lying around the time I started kindergarten. My parents divorced before I could form a memory of a time when they were together, and when I started kindergarten they were each in new relationships. Having divorced parents wasn?t the problem, nor was the fact that they were each seeing new people troublesome to me as a child. Each of the four parental figures in my life each had radically different ideas about how a child should be raised. This, too, would have been fine if it wasn?t for the fact that they all flipped out if they discovered what the other parents and I were up to when I was with them. For example, my stepfather was enraged by my mother?s meditating with me, my mother became angry when my stepfather showed me Disney movies, my father disapproved of playing pokemon, which I enjoyed, and my stepmother simply disliked everything as far as I could tell. Not knowing what she wanted from me, I did my best to avoid her.

This presented me with the contradiction that I was learning that telling the truth was expected of me and what I should do, but the same people who supposedly wanted me to tell the truth expressed either rage or disappointment when I did so regardless of whether the person the emotion was directed towards was present. Often I was the only one around, which was very confusing. Deciding to preserve the peace in the family and to avoid getting in trouble by telling the truth, I started telling each of the four parents exactly what I thought they wanted to hear. It worked marvelously.

Still, I couldn?t explain why I lied to people in the present, why I lied to people other than my parents, or why I was so apathetic about changing my circumstances. My situation became steadily bleaker as the semester wore on. I didn?t know why I wasn?t motivated to go to classes before, but after the breakup I stopped going entirely. For a while I managed to maintain contact with my small circle of friends despite misleading them about how I was doing, but I eventually lost touch with them too.

When the semester ended I didn?t bother keeping in touch with anyone, and my long physical isolation began. I could make a decent case that I had isolated myself long before I retreated to the attic, but that?s beside the point.

The attic where I spent the next seven months was a small room at the top of a house I shared with two housemates. Since it was the attic room, it was more isolated than the rest of the house, which suited me perfectly. It became uncomfortably hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but that was a small price to pay for being able to avoid my housemates as much as possible. Its furnishings consisted of a bed, desk, chair, computer, coffee table, dresser, lamp, and varying amounts of trash that I couldn?t be bothered to do anything about. There were no pictures or other decorations on the white walls. When I needed to buy food after my car broke down in January, I would ask one of my housemates for a ride into town.

Because I couldn?t take action to help myself for reasons I didn?t understand, my problems seemed insurmountable. I ended up spending most of my time gaming in an attempt to forget them. I had discovered that I was able to immerse myself in gaming, videos, or online role playing and forget my problems years ago, and had done so at various points in my life before. The main games I played to silence the pain included World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and League of Legends. Implying that computer games are bad because they provided me a means of escape isn?t my intent. The relief they provided me when I was feeling worst allowed me to survive the experience, and the beginning of my recovery took place in an online community.

Gaming provided some relief, and I spent about as much time distracting myself as I could. When I wasn?t on the computer, I was either sleeping or consumed by thoughts about what a terrible person I was, which was a paralyzing experience and prevented me from doing anything. After all, I had a lot of evidence to support the idea that I was essentially a lying bum living in an attic doing nothing but play computer games while my father wasted money on the rent thinking I was going to college. Some readers might notice that I said my father wasted money, not my parents, or stepparents, or family. The last time I opened up a window to my past there were four parents, and I need to open up another window for the story to make sense going forwards.

My strange four-fighting-parents situation persisted several years, until I was in third grade, which means I should have been around eight years old. Change came in the form of my father having a crisis, dropping everything, and moving from California to Connecticut. My stepmother ceased to be a part of my life entirely, while the evidence that I still had a father came in the form of the occasional phone call or presents for Christmas and my birthday. Meanwhile my mother and stepfather continued to fight, well on their way to their own divorce. Life went on in this fashion for about year until my mother and father decided it would be in my best interests if I lived with him on the east coast, and off I went to the other side of the country. I never moved back to the west coast, and that is part of the reason why my father was paying the rent instead of it being a group endeavor.

Returning to the present, despite distracting myself as best I could, the question of why I behaved the way I did continued to gnaw at me. At first, I thought I might be depressed but that didn?t fit. Depression comes in a variety of forms with a wide range of symptoms, but no combination seemed to describe me adequately. I didn?t experience anhedonia, or a lack of pleasure in activities I enjoyed doing. I was able to tell that most of the time what prevented me from taking action wasn?t sadness or apathy, that came after I failed to do something. Whatever was preventing me from helping myself was a complete mystery to me, and without an answer I concluded that I must be fundamentally broken.

I was still unhappy with my situation and tried to find a way to move forward with my life without confronting my apparently insurmountable problems. My efforts took the form of trying to think of strategies that would allow me to solve one of my practical problems without telling my family about what I was going through. None of the plans I came up with were realistic or doable, as I wasn?t willing to speak or ask for help from anyone, not just my family.

The one area where I did make progress was understanding the nature of my lying. Shortly after realizing that I couldn?t stop lying, the idea occurred to me that I was a pathological liar. This was a terrible thought. My experience with the term pathological liar before was related to horror stories about them, reasons they should be shunned in society for other?s well being, how to spot them before they hurt you, why they?re not really people, and so on. Google brings up a variety of links that are centered around one or more of those statements. Pathological lying isn?t very well understood by psychologists either, and often the people expressing those harmful statements were psychologists themselves. At first I denied the possibility that I was a pathological liar as it was further confirmation that I was a monster.

You're very brave to have posted this. From the very first couple of paragraphs I was reading the entire story for sure. A friend of mine went through a traumatic breakup with his girlfriend a couple of years ago, but he hasn't told me too many details about it. Thank you.

Thanks for the supportive responses everyone, it's very encouraging to get feedback. I have no idea when I'll have enough material to make another post, and I don't want to make any promises. I'll probably be dealing with moving out of the attic and adjusting to a more normal way of life over the next couple days.

Thanks for sharing such a thorough and thoughtfulpost I really appreciated reading it.

Hey folks, it's been a while since I posted this thread but there's been a big development in my road to recovery and I wanted to resurrect it. I managed to speak about my compulsive lying, record what I said, and then publish it as a youtube video. Here's a link, if you're interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeyv79e5fYA