I'm a Big Fat Liar

Throughout my life I've been a liar in one sense or another. As long as I can remember I've been lying about something, to someone, and to be honest, I can't even remember half of them. I lied for my mother, for my step-father, for a boy in 3rd grade, for several ex-boyfriends, for my biological father, for my first husband, for one of my half-brother's friends, for my ex-fiance', for my son, for a friend, for my husband, and to keep my own medical conditions a secret for over 15 years! And those are just the ones I can recall sitting her right now!

Now don't misread this, I'm not saying that I lied to people to deceive them or make them do things I wanted them to do or to be mean, spiteful or be malicious. That's not it. Not at all. Instead, most of the lies I told -- felt I had no choice to tell -- were to protect people. I would lie to protect people, their reputation, their property, their safety, or to keep myself from harm, to keep them from getting in trouble, or to keep a secret that they had either entrusted in me, sworn me to, or threatened me to keep "or else."

My life has been about protecting these secrets, about coming up with story after story, lie after lie, plan after plan in order to keep anyone from finding out. Bad things happen when people find out your "secrets" or discover that you have been lying to cover things up.

I slipped once. Someone caught me in one of my lies and discovered a secret that I had been hiding for a long time. They tried to help me, to help me from having to keep telling lies about this secret but all it did was make things worse. I ended up having to tell more lies to cover up the lies that had been discovered. I blamed the person who tried to help me -- I called her a trouble maker and said that she didn't know what she was talking about and was just trying to stick her nose where it didn't belong. I even accused her of having a crush on my husband -- to make it sound good.

Lies. All lies. But everyone believed them. My secret was safe once again and was able to go back to living with the secret safely hidden with no one suspecting a thing.

It wasn't until recently when I started trying to remember things about my past that I realized that it wasn't *my* past I was trying to remember anymore -- it was the life I had created. I didn't have a past. I only had the lies and the secrets. I only had the life that I had created in my mind in order to protect all those people and their secrets. I only had their lives, their past in my memory.

I'm not going to lie anymore.

I'm not protecting anyone anymore.

I'm not keeping the secrets anymore.

I'm going to start creating memories -- MY memories now.

So if you have a secret that I've been keeping for you, you might want to start coming up with a lie or a story of your own if you want to cover it up from here on -- because I'm not doing it anymore.



***I have begun to write my memoirs and in my story, "Big Fat Liar," I will be telling everything, as I remember it, as it is the truth, to me. No names will be changed unless the person is a minor if/when it ever gets published, as I feel that it's time for people to take responsibility for their own actions, their own lives and their own secrets. I've done it long enough.***

A Name By Any Other ...

You're probably wondering how I got the name for my blog. If you've ever read the quote by William Purkey, you probably already know. However, for those of you who are not familiar with the poem (some call it a "saying"), I've written it here for you:

"Dance like no one is watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like no one is listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth."

I honestly love this poem. I have a want and a true desire to be a person who can live like this, who can throw caution to the wind and put her past mistakes behind her, never allowing those who have hurt her influence her here and now. But can I do that? Can I truly and honest do that? Can anyone truly do that?

There are many times when I do dance like no one is watching, but only when there truly ISN'T anyone watching. And I will sing like no one is listening, when I am alone in my home, the radio volume turned up so loudly that my voice -- even when I am so passionately involved in one of my favorite songs that I sing my heart out (so to speak) -- is but a small vibration mixed somewhere in between the treble and the booming base. Love is not something I'm good at, so I'll skip that one all together.

That leaves us only with the verse that speaks of how we should "live." Well, that, my dear friends, is why I am doing this blog in the first place. I am hoping that through this, I will be able to uncover how to live, and not just be be alive, survive and walk my way through life, one day to the next.

Just a final note on the name of my blog. I wanted to have the name be simple, no characters, no dashes, nothing. However, after attempting several times to register my blog, it appears that there are numerous people who love this poem as much as I do to the point of where they have taken any and all versions of the verse except for the one I have created here. Let's hope that I can do it justice, shall we?