Between Me and Everything Else

When I was about 12 I stole $20 from my dad‘s money clip. I knew that I could blame my brother and that my par­ents would believe me, and that is how it went down. It was a piv­otal moment for me because I got a crazy wave of excite­ment from get­ting away with it. I got a rush from lying. I have since owned up to this mal­ice, but I held on to it for decades.

As I look back on it now, it was a sen­tinel event (in more ways than one). In my young mind, I gained the trust of my par­ents, got the $20, found a fall guy and devel­oped a new strat­egy for all of it. The prob­lem with lying is that it ends up iso­lat­ing me. I don‘t have the tol­er­ance for it that I once did, but it is still in me.

Later in my life, the secret was more impor­tant than the drugs I took in secret. Once the secret part of it is gone, I am no longer inter­ested in the behavior/drug/pattern. Peo­ple who are hurt by my secrets only want the secrets to stop. It is more impor­tant than the behav­ior – to them and to me. It is like when the par­ent knows their child made a mark on the table but asks any­way if he did. The par­ent wants to hear that the child will tell the truth, but what the child wants to do is please the par­ent – no mat­ter what. Lying makes more sense to the kiddo. I learned that les­son early and often and applied it relent­lessly for years. The tran­si­tion to the truth is free­ing, scary, and feels good. And feel­ing good this way is bet­ter than safe loneliness.

The wild open sea of life waits for me when I am liv­ing my truth and being truth­ful. Oth­er­wise I am repeat­ing old, lonely exper­i­ments that leave me in safe, famil­iar and shal­low waters.