This will be a fun little musing today, “Am I a Pathological Liar?” Well after the posts that I have written you probably think so, and although I was accused of being one at a very early age I actually am not. However, it has been something that I have had to deal with my entire life. Living such an audacious life, that no one would ever believe you, is hard. Even as a child I was called a liar by my peers, adults and even teachers. Honestly, it can do a number on your own psyche and eventually you start to wonder yourself, am I a pathological liar? Is this stuff happening to me or am I living a false reality? Deep thoughts right?

As a child I lived a not so normal life. While all of “the basics” in my home town were doing what they considered to be normal things, I was living in a much bigger, more cultured pond and experiencing things that in our small town was not considered “mainstream”. When I would share these experiences and adventures, for example during show and tell with my kindergarten class, I would be told to, and I quote, “sit down and quit fibbing.”

You see my small rural town was very closed minded, and had one way of thinking, period. So, any cultural experience that was being shared at that point by a little white girl like me was a foreign concept. I remember during one show and tell I shared how the previous weekend my family went out to celebrate a birthday dinner by eating sushi with chopsticks, which I had in hand as the show portion. However, this story was not tolerated or accepted in our area, I was speaking pure blasphemy. Heck our town did not have any type of Asian restaurants back in the late 70’s, it barely had a pizza joint; it was burgers, barbecue or fried chicken only, you know the basics.

So, imagine as a 5 year old child when a teacher basically tells you that you are a liar. How does that make you feel? You know your experience was real, your entire family was there, you have pictures, but you are the liar? Let’s just say my life never really got any easier from that point. As I mentioned I have always had ties into the world of Hollywood, so let’s not even go there with those show and tell stories, or what they would have even looked like, I could have never gone there. Remember this is way before Goggle, and before you had social media where everything could just be looked up and verified. You were just ridiculed, and labeled a liar. So right then, I decided to just quit sharing anything with anybody, I mean why bother nobody would believe it anyways?

The second big issue I had was in intermediate school, which did not even have anything to do with this famous tie in my life, ironically. You see I had already carved out my own self worth, and allowed myself to be my own person. I was always comfortable in my own skin, since again I had exposure to cultural experiences that made me different than the rest of “the basics” that I went to school with at the time. While I would try to play the proper role and fit in; it was really like any other acting role. I just became who they wanted me to be for those specific hours of the day, just another “basic” just like them. It was just like they say in the business, you were “on”, but all the time; never letting anyone know too much or see the real me, because again they would never believe it, so fuck them.

So, back to intermediate school incident, I had an issue where a classmate had made a set of “pot brownies” and brought them in for the entire class for a celebration and they had told me about them on the bus that morning. Since a lot of us were on a sports team together, this could potentially cause everyone an issue upon ingestion. I decided to warn my fellow teammates, not to eat the brownies for fear of it ruining our game that day. This ended back firing on me, as I was accused of slander by the teacher, no less, and got kicked off the team! WOW, why not just test the brownies and see if I am right? Yeah this was how things were handled back in the 80’s. You are a kid, you are lying and you are just guilty and will be punished, the entire Ferris Bueller scenario I guess, adults were really stupid and self absorbed back then. It was also a time of massive excess, and honestly the teacher probably took the brownies to the lounge, where all the teachers probably ate them while laughing at my “slanderous lying ways” then drove home in their sad sack Civics. I will say that this one event did have a serious fall out in going forward in my school career, which was damaging, so no good deed goes unpunished. Yeah I may still be a bit pissed about this whole scenario.

Let me just say, I could have cared less about any of these people all getting high at the time. The infamous Hollywood style “mousetraps” I had been invited to over the years had plenty of princess parties with cocaine covered coffee tables, compliments of a large company that would shock you all to your core to this very day, or maybe not. This is a story for a different day but believe me it is a doozie.

Honestly as I look back on it, most of the adults that felt I was lying were my teachers, maybe the root of all evil. Which is funny, maybe it goes back to that old adage of those that can do, and those that can’t teach. Maybe since they could not and were teaching they had a real problem with a child living their best life, and rubbing their nose in the fact they had only amounted to being a teacher? My husband and I have talked about this at length and how it has possibly effected society, we decided this is why our generation turned into God awful helicopter moms and such, because the sad hippy teachers that taught us were not great, and dismissed what our generation was saying. Now our generation Gen-X has over compensated for these sad sack teachers that were in these jobs, because they never amounted to anything, verses the teachers of today that really always wanted to be teachers to make a difference; which is our generation. Sadly now today’s teachers can not do their jobs because of our generation being ruined by the previous set of teachers being so awful. Right? I mean think about that musing for a minute and what is really wrong with the entire school system and teaching today, and how it came about. Along with all the participation awards, and the all inclusiveness crap which has essentially made Gen Z, the next generation, a bunch of pussy’s!

So am I a liar? I mean I guess I could be, but I really hate liar’s so I doubt it. I mean as it stands lying is one of my unforgivable offenses. I do not mean a little white lie, I mean a straight up to my face lie, which I LOVE to catch people in all the time. You would be surprised at the number of times I catch liars, and I find that people tend to lie more than they actually tell the truth, which is really scary. I also really do not care for people that just omit the truth, which is what my husband’s family loves to do all the time. So, “technically they did not lie, they never mentioned the truth“, which drives me nuts! What a bunch of shit!

All I can say is this experience made me realize a lot about people and the psyche behind what creates them, makes them stronger. I can personally say I never shared the majority of my vast experiences growing up simply because of the ridicule, which was probably based in jealousy. Now days we have things like social media and people document everything, because if it was not posted it never happened. I honestly have toyed with posting some of my older photos taken simply with an old 110 camera, with film back in the day, just to shut up some of the doubters and people that believed that these things never happened. Maybe I still will, as I am still thinking about that book idea, this is merely me putting ideas to paper, on a platform to see how it all works out. We will see if it is as interesting as I am told it is at the close door dinner parties and gatherings where my “tall tales”, which could never be true have already been told. Who knows you may recognize some of the story plots from some of your favorite television shows!

Just Another Pretty Little Liar

Veronica J.