Dandelion Death Trap

If you spend enough time with me (about 5 minutes at least), you may notice that I'm a compulsive liar.

I lie a lot. Jon Lovitz used to have a character on Saturday Night Live called Tommy Flanagan, the Pathological Liar. His lies were like the majority of mine are; just jokes.

I'm not sure when I started lying, but I'm sure I was young. It started as a fun game. Make up outlandish tales and try to pass them off as truth. Tell the cashier that our mom had a pet alligator in the closet she would threaten to feed my brother or I to. Tell my teacher about how I invented time travel. Or the always classic game of trying to convince my brother that he was adopted and that he was actually born a girl.

If you spend more than 5 minutes with me, you find out that once in a while, I'm really good at making up pure crap. I love to try and trick the gullible -- not necessarily out of a sense of malice, but more just because I like making people laugh.

The problem with lying is that it's not a very controllable skillset. It's not something you can turn off easily because it's a very slimey skill that can be transferred over to pretty much any area of life.

First you are making up lies about how you once spent your summer in a body cast because of a banana peel. Next, you make up a little tale about why you were late for work. Then, maybe for convenience, you make up a little, white lie about why you missed a deadline. I mean, these are small lies, so they don't do any real harm, right?

The thing I hate about lies -- specifically the lies that I tell -- are that they make for easy ways out of situations and conversations that I'd rather not have.

Lies, like vicodin or alcohol or pornagraphy, are habit forming. If you do it enough and find that you can get away with it enough, you'll do it more and more and more...Lying is like a really good brand of duct tape that you can use to "patch" anything. Like duct tape, a good lie covers up holes, can hold things together for awhile, or even pass as fixing something -- but, just like duct tape, a lie is just a cover. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't fill any gaps. It just makes them hard to see.

Another way I can look at my lies is how I think they will save me. Sometimes, when there's a question that somebody is asking you -- maybe it's something personal, something that brings up a lot of emotion -- in times like that, a lie is the only thing you can do.

Think of it like this: you are walking along the side of a steep, mountain. Your feet slip on the gravel and you go down. You are sliding down the side of that mountain and you are scared about what's gonna happen when you hit the rock bottom. So you start grabbing at weeds in the gravel. Now you know that the weeds can't save you. You know that no matter how many you grab, they won't stop you -- you're falling at too great a speed. But you grab for them anyway. Because to you, the man or woman sliding out of control, doing something you know can't help is better than not knowing what to do at all.

See, that's where my lies get addictive. I don't handle emotions well. Especially emotions that I struggle to be able to put into words. So when a friend asks me about what is going on or what I'm feeling, I panic. When a friend is trying to help me find a light to my path, I freak out.

I hate darkness. I hate chaos. So when I feel surrounded by both, I grab for the only thing that I feel I have to grab on to: a lie. I know the lie won't help me, but I also have no clue what will. So for me, in that moment, the rationale thing is to spew a lie.

And that's how I find myself in a wreck with many of my friends at times. When they see me sliding down that gravel slope, grabbing at handfuls of dandelions trying to save myself, they try to throw me a rope, but I don't trust myself to grab the rope. The easier thing is to grab the weeds.

Lies are a miserable thing. They never grow trust; they create distance. They never breathe life; they limit it. They never create opportunities; they shut doors and burn bridges.

But even though I know that it's a bad habit of mine, I find it hard to break. Because when I'm spinning, disoriented, and unable to find my bearings, lying just seems to rational to pass up.

Tonight, I pray for a God that continues to let me slide, but only on barren slopes. Tonight, I pray for friends who would see through my crap. Tonight, I pray for freedom from my lies.