In my life, I have
sort of built up this reputation to be gullible. I have this sometimes horrible
habit of (almost always) believing everything that people tell me. I want to
believe them because I think: why would
they lie to me? What logical, practical reason would anyone have to lie to
someone like me: your average non-suspecting, non-judgmental, labelled
“sometimes too nice” person? More especially when it’s someone that I know
well, someone I’m close with, either through family or a friend type of person,
who I’ve known for multiple years. With friends, most especially, I would hope
they would know they could tell me any
truth. I hope they would
know that I would never judge them for anything, that I would love them and
support them no matter what. Lying
to me would just serve no purpose, I hope they would know. There would never be
a reason to.
And
sometimes, I find that it just happens anyway. The reality is that I’m smart
and while I’m gullible in an unintentional sense (review the above paragraph), it
is not a permanent attribute that I possess. Once I start to mentally poke
holes in the stories and realize that I’ve been given multiple answers for the
same question, I begin to pick up on the fabrication. And when that happens,
being ever trusting and gullible isn’t a frame of mind that I choose to linger
in.
I go
from unsuspecting and always believing to a stone wall. I’m no longer listening
because let’s be real: it probably isn’t true. I’m no longer interested in the
nonsense you’re spewing because honestly, it’s probably someone else’s story
that you tweaked to fit your personality. You have plagiarized, you have lied
through your perfect teeth, and you have conned me.
But it
will only happen once.
I know
so many people (and if I’m being brutally
honest, man hater moniker be damned, a large majority of them are men) who just
have this tendency to build up stories. I mean, sure, we have all exaggerated
from time to time to keep the surrounding company interested but that’s not
what I’m referring to. I am talking specifically about people who straight up
make up stories to blow my banded skirt up. People who have sat there and not
just lied, but created elaborate stories about all kinds of things while they
just sat across from me and stared me dead in the face. People who have
absolutely no reason to fabricate a story, especially to me, yet sit there and
ramble on about the first colorful idea that pops into their head. And in my
experience, some of this crap isn’t even remotely believable.
Being nice merely to be liked
in return nullifies the point. –Criss Jami
You
know, I once had a boyfriend who seemed to be incessantly guilty of this exact
thing. And it wasn’t just with me; it was with nearly everyone he came into
contact with. It affected his parents, his grandparents, his friends, and his
co-workers. No one was exempt from his insane ability to come up with erroneous
stories on the fly. He was truly gifted when it came to storytelling.
And
what I always found annoying was that his friends were like, in on it. They
were present at some of the exact situations he had laid claim to and switched
around for his benefit. They were (almost) always privy to the real story, as
well as the fact that he changed it to make himself appear tougher, smarter, the
better firefighter, etc. and they never said a word. They seemed to have no
interest in correcting him and they never exhibited a desire to call him out on
it. Some warped brand of bullshit bro code, I would assume.
Confession:
I was always curious to know if he
knew that they knew he made
absolutely everything up. I will
probably never know and to be honest, he probably never cared. Deny, deny, deny. All I know is that I’m
a writer in my spare time and even I
can’t come up with stuff like that. I’m telling you, being involved with that
man was most certainly life changing.
But to
be fair, this isn’t an ailment that purely affects men. I know quite a few
women who make a habit of turning things around. I know one woman in particular
who habitually went out of her way to fabricate stories. In her case, I always
felt like it was her way of “fitting in”. Maybe she felt like she was older
than the rest of us (and granted, she was, but not by a lot) or maybe she just
felt like she had to colorfully participate in our conversation in order to get
noticed or maintain her outwardly “cool” demeanor.
Whatever the case, it was
always prevalent, and similar to my ex-boyfriend’s situation, I’m pretty sure
that I wasn’t the only person to pick up on it.
One of
the things that really bothered me about all of this was that I never really
knew where I stood with her. I wanted
to trust her, I wanted to like her,
and I wanted to confide in her but
her conflicting stories made it difficult. I would listen to her stories about
other people, coupled with questions about my personal life and how things were
going on my end. And to her credit, she seemed genuinely interested in me. She
would even swap recipes with me! (And that was something I always remember
fondly because I was really young then and I didn’t really have a lot of
recipes in my repertoire.)
Sometimes,
a lot of times, I really wanted to be her friend. She was relatively stylish
and happily married. She was a mom and
a stepmom and she was really, really good at juggling everything in both her
home and work environment. She was extremely personable (one of the reasons
that people were so drawn to her and inclined to believe every word she said)
and she made parenting look easy. At that time, I was so excited to get married
and have babies that I wanted to be just like her. (Literally all I want in
life is to have beautiful brown eyed children, a happy marriage, and a body
that bounces back beautifully after each baby. Think Jessica Robertson…)
The trouble with excuses, however,
is they become inevitably difficult to believe after they’ve been used a couple
of times. –Scott Spencer
But
for all her allegedly amazing qualities, she had a lot that weren’t so great.
For example, for all those awesome recipes she gave me and for all the times
she asked me questions about my life and seemed legitimately attentive, she was
using it against me, turning it around and gossiping behind my back. It took me
some time but I put the pieces together when her stories would change by the
day, and pretty soon, her seemingly close knit friends started going through a
similar revolving door. One minute she loved you, the next she was writing you
up and trying to get you fired. It was like the second she realized you were
onto her she concocted some reason to terminate you. Now this woman, she was a great storyteller.
It
just all seemed so exhausting to me. Like, why not just be honest with people?
Why not just be who you are and hope for the best? What’s the worst that
happens? They don’t like you? Then move onto the next. Especially in her case;
I mean, she was the director of a school. She was our boss. Even if some of us
didn’t like her, we had to pretend to. She signed our paychecks so we had to be
nice. Even if we knew that she was making up stories, setting up employees and
parents for failure, and lying about stuff to fit in with the younger group of
girls, we had no option but to respect her.
So
like, why lie and con us? What is the purpose of an imaginary world when most
of us could blatantly see right through it?
I had
this other friend, a male friend, who sort of did the same thing. A lot of his
problem was that he was so charming, it was nearly irrevocable. Like, he could
literally get away with a lot more than the average person because he was so
unfairly charismatic. It even worked on me the majority of the time.
But
then, I started to pick up on things. I could quickly poke holes in his story.
He would tell me he was in West Palm for the weekend, and then two days later
claim that he was actually in Germany. And of course, because he was one of
those people who despised being confronted, he would flip the entire story
around. Suddenly I was the bad guy and I was mixing it all up. I had clearly
misunderstood. “No, I wasn’t there,” he would smile, “Remember, I told you.
Germany.” He talked to me like I was in the goddamn dementia ward.
Yeah, yeah, you’re right, I’d say. My mistake. It wasn’t my job to embarrass him; he had done that all
on his own.
But it
wouldn’t end there. It would be, “Look, let me show you on a map where I was.”
Thank goodness for those GPS apps, right? Then it would morph into some warped
version of a story, probably similar to something he had seen in a movie. He would
tell me names and places, meals he had the pleasure of eating, and people he
had met on the plane. Well, you would just never guess what celebrity he sat
behind!
And I
would just be like: Have you ever heard the more elaborate the story, the
bigger the deceit? Like, if you’re being honest right now then I am goddamn
Julianna Margulies and my job is to make out with Jeffrey Dean Morgan every
damn day…
Moral of the Crazy: The truth is that we get
conned every day. We get conned by our insurance companies, we get conned by
expensive retail chains, and we get conned by the government. It happens,
friends. And to be fair, probably a lot more than we would ever realize. I just
don’t think it should be condoned in our friendships, in our romantic
relationships. We owe each other, and ourselves, more than that.
I know
I harp a lot on dishonesty. But that’s because it’s a plague. It’s disgusting
and damaging and I’m sorry, but I deserve more than that. I deserve way more
than just the icing. I don’t deserve the bullshit stories that people tell just
to receive horizontal refreshments. I don’t care about where you’ve supposedly
travelled, who you’ve allegedly met, or what various countries your purported
beauty queen ex-girlfriend hails from.
Unless it’s true.
I care
about your character, your loyalty, and your honesty. Everything else is
replaceable, my brother (or sister)!
I
think the realer you are, the more you have to offer me. All others need not
apply. Because like they say, truth is stranger than fiction.
Bullshit makes the flowers grow
and that is beautiful. –Gregory Hill
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