What’s that old saying, “Truth is often buried in lies”.
I have always struggled with telling a lie. As a kid, if I told a lie I would burst within an hour to go tell the person the truth.
Here is a funny example. When I was a teenager I had bladder issues. If I jumped in any way I would pee on myself. I got invited to a friend’s house and she had a trampoline. I knew I was in trouble but I jumped anyway. But after we jumped around a bit and I headed home I went straight to our garage. I grabbed a cup of water and poured it on the floor and sat in it. All so I could tell my mom when she asked why my pants were wet “I had sat in water”. It wasn’t a lie to me at this point. I had created my own version of the truth.
If I did lie and tried to get away with it, the lie would feel like it was crushing me. I couldn’t sleep and I could barely eat. I would feel heavy and ugly inside. I decided as a teenager I never wanted to feel this way again. I would do whatever it took not to lie or to manipulate a situation into my own version of the truth. This was just as unhealthy as telling the lie but I didn’t learn this until later on in life.
I was seventeen when I wrote a lot of my poetry. I spent a lot of my time alone in my room. So I had a lot of time to think. One day I was thinking about how I wished it was easy for me to lie. Why couldn’t I just be like everyone else? Why did lying have to haunt me so much? I couldn’t just be a casual lier. It would have made life so much easier if I could. Or at least, so I thought.
Then I started thinking about how even though I couldn’t lie to others the one thing I was good at was lying to myself.
In my previous post, I talked about how I dealt with issues of lust. If I ever slipped up in this area of my life I would constantly lie to myself that it didn’t happen.
It was after one of these episodes that I wrote “Lies’. I had this very vivid visual of how it is true that truth can be buried in lies.
Lies
Lies I tell myself,
Lies told to me,
Lies not meant to hurt,
Lies to cover things we can’t admit,
Lies to cover things in me,
Lies often hurt,
Lies buried deep like a casket in the ground,
Lies that cover our graves like wilted flowers and well-maintained grass,
Lies like a gaunt tombstone grey and bleak,
Lies like a visitor to the long and gone,
Lies told to me by myself.