#Scurf 116: The interior lives of lies we tell ourselves

On the art of lying to others and then to yourself

Unrelated to the post, this photo is from a recent holiday I took.

Hi friends. I am going to try to write this newsletter more regularly and do some things where each month I write interconnected pieces that tie in which each other loosely. Largely informal, these will make the essays kind of gathered around particular themes from that moment in time, or not. They will still be all in keeping with the granular idea behind this newsletter — all of them will essentially be works in progress. I will continue to play around with germs of ideas, themes and radical notions and push them out of my outbox each week to see what gathers moss in your reading. These essays will be weekly, if not more frequent. When in the week I don’t know, how long or short I don’t want to know, but mostly bursting with ideas that are out of left field.

Here’s a piece about lying to ourselves and others, and the thin (sometimes nonexistent) line between them. I was lied to by quite a few people this last month, so you can say it’s been on my mind, and made me easily glide between the lines to catch these liars red-handed! Read and share with fellow liars, trackers and readers.

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Someone I know got married the arranged way this past month. They were not in love, and met with their partner through an arrangement created by their parents. They lied because they were ashamed to be of a certain age and not having had fallen in love by then. They didn’t want to tell the world that theirs was an arranged marriage. No one even asked. And yet they felt the need to lie. To tell shame-facedly a brazen, white lie about having met their prospective partners through Tinder. When in reality they met through another match-making site, Shaadidotcom or some such.

Another person I know is starting a new job at a place that is known for its grossly toxic work environment. This is different from lying about their prospective life partners, but its a lie that’s on a similar plane. Both are lies we tell ourselves but we think we’re telling others. That this job will not affect us, that people will not see through this lie, that our lives will continue to be protected by the veneer of other things. But these lying souls seldom forget that they are surrounded by a life that is constantly unfolding, and are in it with people who are constantly seeing us. Seeing us not in a social media kind of a keeping watch way, but seeing us for who we are. Our lives with these people are equal parts engaging, devastating and disturbing. And these lies have a way of getting uncovered.

I know this.

I was a reasonably good liar in the earlier part of my life. Childhood makes liars of us all. Irrespective of where we are from, how happy or sad or scared. One way or the other childhood makes us fabricate, misinform or even spill a tale or two. To either our parents, or friends, or neighbours. With that takes birth a nascent, burning fire within. Of feeling cheated by our own selves, of awaiting punishment of some kind, of being at the fringes of our own life. But slowly we learn the silliness of lying for these small things, and move past them. Lies don’t sing the way to us the way they used to when we were kids and used them as umbrage to get past a seemingly tough spot. We see ourselves as getting better at handling uncomfortable situations, and start staying away from lying.

In the last couple of months, I realised it’s not the same way for everyone. Some people continue to lie to make their lives look better than they actually are. But what happens with lying in adulthood is that you seldom realise that you’re not lying to that one friend, or that stray stranger, or that wayward acquaintance or your parents. You’re lying to yourself. I am no one to pass a moral judgment on others, but having been lied to serially in the last few months, I feel I can make a small, if sly, perception about who and how these people are. And it’s that they’re not mere liars, but are deluded by their own sense of entitlement.

Lying about your life is different from embellishing it with superlatives on social media. Online we are all always having the best time with the best people throughout the year, on every single day of the month. There, one beaming, teeming post doesn’t differ much from the rest. These lies, on the other hand, are a class apart.

Irl, it hardly matters if you get married the arranged way or after falling for someone. Marriages wither and chip away either way. It also doesn’t matter if in your heart you know that this new job is going to take you down, and yet you take it up because of an unknown peer bubble around you — both give away equally easily. What matters is that in that moment you refused to look at yourself in the eye in the mirror. You didn’t peer deep and back into your soul. You let your perception of the world get the better of you.

And hence you not only lose yourself a friend, but also in that moment, a part of you. All this while others are able to see right through you. Remember when in college you thought no one knew that you and that friend were sneakily sleeping around? They all knew — but didn’t want to prick your bubble because they cared (or didn’t).

Instead you could be honest. Forthright with what you feel about a decision. As they say, there’s nothing more attractive that honesty. You could get over the anguish of your own decision, own it up before the world and be confident. Maybe some people won’t get it, maybe your Kummerspeck wouldn’t want to let go, maybe the reactions you get from people will be slightly annoying — so be it!

Your truth makes you who you are. A lot many actors, writers, artists have said that deep down they never forget where they come from. Earlier, tried as I might’ve I perpetually failed to understand what that meant — “where you come from”. I took it too literally and thought of my place of birth, or I took it a tad too metaphorically and thought of ambiguous things. But now, I think I get what it means. Albeit just cerebrally, but I feel it refers to accepting the person you are, understanding yourself first and being your truest version. That might not lead you to many places but it’ll certainly not lead you into misshapen vortex of your own crumbled grip of yourself.

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It’s been a month and I still don’t have any new publications. I feel weird about it but more than that a disparate, strange emptiness sits at the pit of my stomach. A blank space that comes from not having written (except these sparse posts). Hope it fills itself back soon.

I am now trying to get a bit more regular here (and not jinx it by typing these words). It would be lovely if you’d share this newsletter with your friends, cousins, acquaintances, even parents. Anyone who reads for leisure will find something of their liking in my list of scurf posts so far. There are not just essays they are deflections, fragments, and entanglements where I try to thread a needle, one topic at a time. These are mostly just for me. But through these acutely personal musings, I am also trying to find meaning for you. These posts are wayward, and sometimes also make me feel exposed. But mostly they are me in parenthesis, digressions where I try to piece myself together for me, before you. Sometimes they are longer than those long nights, at others, shorter than a sigh. I do feel shy and uncomfortable at the thought of sending some of these out, and maybe will put those weirder ones behind a paywall soon too, but till then all of them are free and I hope you enjoy sharing and reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.

See you soon again!