i am a liar
Anna Drattell, Creative Nonfiction
Friday, April 29, 2022
I am a liar. Not always, only sometimes. Only out of necessity. Usually. This tendency initially implanted itself in the movement of my mouth out of survival and quickly burgeoned into an unconscious habit, the movement of which became as intuitive as the outward-inward motion of my lungs when I would breathe. I do not always mean to lie; truth be told, I can’t really help it.
Part 1: The First Lie
When I was in sixth grade, and my art teacher asked the class who stole all of the colorful markers, I lied and said I did not do it. “I am not a thief,” I repeated. But I was one. Sure, I stole only colorful markers and nothing major, but I stole them nonetheless. I stole them because I vehemently hated the bland, dark, and gray-colored ones; they represented everything I was and, for that reason, everything I desperately did not want to be. Unnoticed. Unwanted. It was a dull, muddled brown that no one hated per se, but no one went out of their way to grab and claim when it was time to make Valentine’s Day cards.
I also stole all of the colorful markers because I wanted to fill every little bland white space in my coloring books and Valentine’s Day cards with strokes of scintillating, vivid color, chaotically and all over, just like I color my life. I felt like all of the color had been squashed out of me, so I grabbed as much of it as I could from the “drawer tower” in my classroom. I tore off the caps roughly so the ink would bleed onto my fragile fingers, and I let it seep into my skin, branding my hollow bones with echoes of the fallacy that, at that moment, I felt beautiful. They were washable, but I did not care. I left the ink on my skin for the rest of the day, drawing scars over my arms, and imagined they were beautiful. This way, I could be broken too.
It was a class that taught art. And what was I? Definitely not art. Certainly not the kind that I thought people would love; bright and shiny. Maybe I was a VanGogh, artistically brilliant but painfully tortured. But I was certainly not a Claude Monet lily pond; delicate and beautiful.
But then again, I suppose that maybe all art—true art that makes you feel things—is tortured, a bit muddled. But still, that type of art is, more often than not, deemed unpleasant. Not worth as much money. Not as many people fight over it at the auctions.
It was ironic that I didn’t feel colorful because when I dared to look inward and not outward, I saw that my curious eyes and piano-playing hands were filled with vibrant colors that dripped from my forefingers and my guitar strings. But too much color, or so I was taught, made me feel muddled when I wanted to be seen as the rainbow. I was too much, yet not enough. Always in between.
I am not a thief. I am just a human.
Part 2: Fuck You
The first time I ever really lied, I had to, you see. Or at least I convinced myself I did.
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I met him on a youth group trip when I was a freshman. Johnny. He had a fluffy mop of hair that toed the line between brown and a deep red like my cheap hair dye attempt the following year when I was a sophomore, freckles dotting the center of his cheeks and crawling up to the bridge of his nose, and the cadence of a crooner. He called me beautiful, so naturally, I was confused when I looked into his eyes and felt cold and alone and afraid, his smiles became alarm bells, and my hands became the chains that kept me tethered to the tortured love affair between God and me and the girl I was before I met Johnny.
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A year went by, and I did not dare talk about Johnny. I did not dare say his name. I did not dare cry in public. I did not dare say a damn thing about the guy who changed my life and tried to break it all at once.
But this was a confusing experience. Because Johnny tried to break me, but he called me beautiful. Was it not actually trauma that I experienced that night if he also called me beautiful? I wondered. When guys call me beautiful, is this what they mean? Is this what I should expect? Why do people say they love me or that I am beautiful and then try to fuck me, and then if I don’t want to, they grab me quickly and leave? I don’t get it. I found it all a bit contradictory. Very confusing for a 14-year-old girl. I felt like a vessel, a thing to be empty and filled by another as if my pain and life experiences were anything but my own. It didn’t feel right, but at the same time, I just wanted to feel colorful and shiny and bright. And Johnny called me beautiful. Close enough, I guess.
During the year after I met him, I saw Johnny in the faces of every guy at school, every male teacher, basically every man in my life. But I feel every emotion with every fiber of my being. I am a passionate lover, a fierce friend, a tortured empath, and when I get angry, I get really angry. So in my journal each night, I’d write in pure impulsive teenage fashion, “Fuck you, Johnny. Fuck. you.”
So to avoid exposing myself, I proceeded to lie, but out of survival, an escape from my deep, raw feelings.
“The trip was really fun. Never a dull moment.”
“Yeah, I’m doing okay.”
“Just staring into space.”
“Lost in thought.”
“I’m not sad, just bored.”
“Not sad, just tired.”
“Just…”
“Really, really confused.”
“But I’ll be okay, I promise.”
Then, just as I attempted during my sixth-grade art class, I looked inward and tried speaking directly to myself:
“I am not a thief.”
“I am not a statistic or a number.”
“I am not a victim.”
“I am a warrior. I survive.”
“I persevere.”
“I am not necessarily broken, per se. I am just a human, and sometimes humans break. And that’s okay.”
Part 3: A shitty, wannabe athlete studying for a French quiz and stressed out about prom while drinking coffee
Sometimes I lie just for the fun of it. At this point, I have learned over the years how to tame my smile and make it subtle but not too rigid where it looks like I’m trying too hard, position my hands correctly, and make it, so my eyes don’t move around nervously but also don’t stare down the person to whom I am speaking to have people believe that my lies are reality. For example:
My taxi driver asks me what I do for a living or for fun? “I’m a competitive figure skater,” I might say. “Been doing it since I was four.” This is just blatantly false. Even though one of my older brothers was a starter on varsity baseball and basketball during his freshman year and my Dad was also a star high school basketball player, I am embarrassingly subpar at most sports I attempt. I did not inherit the athletic gene—my consistent shin splint injuries, routine visits to the athletic trainer’s office, and dismal track and field race times prove this.
Cashier asks me how my day went? “I aced my French quiz. Got asked out to prom.” Neither of these is true whatsoever. I nearly failed my French quiz, and the guy I like has no clue how I feel because, every once in a while, Johnny’s gut-wrenching words when I was a 14-year-old freshman sitting on a bench still cradle themselves within my eardrums, making me feel unlovable. I do my best not to listen to them, and often I don’t, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t remember feeling cold and alone and confused whenever I do. Because even though his face has slowly faded from memory, I can still remember his words, reminiscent of a mystifying patriarchal impertinence.
Barista asks me where I’m headed so early? “Stopping for a quick pick-me-up after a post-4:30 am wake-up 5-mile run.” (This is half-true. I woke up closer to 5 am to fake productivity to myself—if I can successfully wake up early enough, I have enough grounds to lie that I had a productive, “it girl” morning that will hopefully make people proud—but I ended up barely running a mile after I realized that I really, really hate pretending. But it’s too late. The lie had already left my lips. I cannot take it back. Now I have to run with this story, hear white lie after white lie leaves my perfidious lips and accumulate on top of each other.
Though these lies are unnecessary, the purpose they serve is that people seem to be proud and in awe of me as a result of lying. I check all of their boxes. Like I am colorful, radiant, beautiful, but inside the lines—not chaotically and all over to the point where I become muddled and too convoluted to understand honestly.
The popular people I knew were always skinny, so I acted like I worked out a lot or played a sport to make myself believe that I was too. Growing up in accelerated academic programs and being the daughter of an immigrant, I placed the need unto myself to always get good grades, to be perfect, even if I wasn’t. And I have always been shitty at time management, so if I can successfully lie and make it seem like I am, in fact, productive, people might look at me and say, “Wow. That girl is going places. And she is so, so beautiful.”
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I wish that I could stop being a compulsive liar. I wish I could stop breaking trust and hurting people when I lie. I wish I could be honest with myself, but I fear I cannot. I fear I no longer know how. I keep trying not to lie and catch myself whenever I do, but it is admittedly challenging because I have made it into who I am, even if it started spiraling out of necessity.
Part 4: Mirrors Made Me a Better Liar
The same year I stole the colorful markers, I also started doing musical theater. In the years that followed, I hated staring at myself in the mirror in the main dance studio. I despised dancing freely in front of my peers when there was a likelihood that I, with my low athletic abilities, could have fallen and embarrassed myself. I dreaded every single solo.
And though, over time, I became more confident since physically looking inward was quite literally the only option I had in that dance studio, and I had to grow accustomed to the stretch marks on my upper thighs and the way that every costume never fit quite right, I also became a more proficient liar. I technically had to; if I wanted to give the best performance, I had to become an entirely different person.
I’ve been Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Cinderella’s Evil Stepmother in Into the Woods saw her cruelty and calculated nature as a result of years of being unloved and an inherent need to survive. There was Kurt von Trapp in my sleepaway camp’s production of The Sound of Music, gentle and mischievous. Witty. Though all of the various characters I embodied each differed in insignificance, they each forced me to develop entirely different mannerisms and personality traits.
There was even Fish #1, another one of my camp’s productions of Moana. Though I was only a fish, I observed the girl who played Moana, how she was strong-willed, fearless, and wonderfully wild—filled with color. Bright, vivid color. Chaotically. All over. Both inside and outside of the lines. People didn’t always see this as beautiful. Moana was seen as too complicated, too much. But she had to weather through the storm and look inward and find beauty within herself. And that was enough.
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Shakespeare did get it right in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances.” And I am going to perform.