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.***