untruthful elegy

lying as a new religion and on being let go

vents au bois à nassogne - richard heintz

You spend three years in therapy and suddenly you cannot remember how to be honest. You learn to lie in a way that will let your psychiatrist say “I’m proud of you” and “I see so much change from where you started” before still upping your dosage for a medication that you lie about taking. You learn to lie in a way that will let you avoid the third repetition of suggesting going on a walk every day. The sunlight helps, you know this, but it does not heal enough for you to stop lying. And so you shuffle through the movements of: psychiatrist, therapist, medication, psychiatrist, therapist, medication; you shuffle through mindset after mindset until you realize you cannot remember how to be honest and you cannot remember your own face and so you buy a set of four box cutters off Amazon and call the police. 

You spend two weeks in an outpatient program in the middle of nowhere. You have to walk an hour and a half every morning to sit through another four hours of passing grief around a circle, but it gives you a routine and it lets you keep your mother’s eating disorders unopened in the closet. You stop telling lies but you don’t tell the truth either, so you just pass pieces of your grief around and try to hold others’ griefs in your hands, and when they ask you about the set of box cutters you say “I’d rather not talk about that” instead of telling them how they’re stacked on top of your mother’s eating disorders. 

Halfway through the program, you call your mother because this was also the year you learned all mothers were once their daughters. You call her hoping for some epiphany, some grand connection, some message from God in the form of a mother, but you get the same accusations you lied your way out of through the psychiatrist, therapist, medication, psychiatrist, therapist, medication cycle and so you go back to lying so you at least don’t have to hear about how things that are all in your head can only be solved by using your head. You lie because you have learned what patterns will let your mother comfort you and what patterns lead to her anger and even though your therapist calls you manipulative and your psychiatrist calls this a symptom, you lie so your mother will tell you she loves you.

You start to create your own philosophy. Where there is grief, anger will grow and you have spent so long drowning in grief the only raft you know how to build is one of anger. You are angry at the therapists that hand you pamphlet after pamphlet about respectful communication. Fake conversations circled in pretty, flowery boxes of boundary setting. Language spoken with such precision you no longer sound human and you watch the group pass the language around the way they passed the grief and you grow angrier still at how it seems to work for them when you have already learned lies are the only effective weapons. You wonder where the line between social cue and manipulation is drawn and you decide that since you cannot see this line that is so obvious to the world, maybe you are the one that’s been lied to. 

And so you start lying again because this is what your friends have told you to do. And maybe your parents are too old and your psychiatrist too lost in academia to remember reality and your therapist too well-adjusted, so maybe this time you will learn to lie in a way that changes. Lie in a way that becomes the truth. And so you learn to wait five minutes between texting back even if you have nothing else to do and you learn to say yes to things that leave knife wounds and no to things that you would gladly take a bullet for and you pretend that you are happy because how ungrateful do you have to be to still be unhappy after all of this? 

You wonder why you cannot write anymore and you realize it is because you have forgotten how to be honest. Your little sister asks you why you are always lying and you, in jealousy, tell her she has not lived long enough to have needed to lie. But you wonder if maybe this isn’t a hard-earned prize from years of growth, but instead a muzzle on a rabid dog, forsaken by the veterinarians. After all, the truths of happy people seem to float like bubbles while you have watched your truths leave bloodstains across every aspect of your life and wasn’t that the whole point to begin with? Wasn’t the smell of rot and blood what drove you to the psychiatrist three years ago? Was it not you that begged him to rip your canines out so you would stop biting, so you would stop hurting, so you would stop seeing eyes filled with hurt? And was it not you who learned to lie and swallow your own teeth so the blood would stop? 

And you start to realize the teeth you have swallowed have been scraping against your lungs, against your stomach, against your throat, and maybe in your desperation to stop shedding the blood of others, the only blood left to shed was your own. What a curse it is to be born with sharp teeth and nothing to bite. What a curse it is to be born with teeth so easily sharpened. And what a curse it is that it is easier to sharpen than to dull. Your therapist tells you to start writing gratitude journals and so you write “what a blessing it is to have sharp teeth rather than soft flesh” but neglect to mention you were only born with the latter. What a blessing it is to be a dog and not a wolf, even when the dog is rabid and the wolf is free. 

Your therapist says you need to be more honest with yourself before you can grow. Watch every thought drift by and keep the ones that matter, but still acknowledge each one. You try to listen to her, but the ones that let go always float back and you understand the grief of parenthood a little more. You wonder if your parents also tried to acknowledge you before they let you go. You wonder if your parents also never learned how to acknowledge you in a way that would stay. You think how cruel it is for the ones that remain unacknowledged to always return instead of the ones that are important. 

You are home for two and a half months, which is two months longer than everyone else that went home for Christmas. You are home for Christmas for maybe the last time in many, many, many years and your parents remind you of this daily. You have learned it is easier to be a willing prisoner than one that fights, so you bury truths in lies about how you would choose family. Or maybe it’s lies in truths since you really would choose duty every time. Your mother once told you about the ten years she did not speak to your grandfather, but your hands have always been softer than your mother’s so you cannot bear to tell her the same fear that caused her to run is what is keeping you here. But all mothers were once their daughters and so when she packs you a suitcase, she does not ask you to come back. But all mothers were once their daughters and so when she packs you a suitcase, she does not acknowledge she is letting you go. 

---