Liars Prosper

If you call yourself a liar, I want to know what about that word is so appealing to you. Because to be labeled a liar doesn't mean you occasionally tell a white lie to get out of something uncomfortable; to be a liar means to twist someone's outcome because of something you meddled in. To be a liar is to fuck with someone's head and their vision of reality. I'm not talking about lying to spare someone's feelings. 

Let me paint a scenario.

Sarah tells Cindy she's going on a date with Ben. Cindy replies, "Really? He asked me out last week."

Sarah trusts Cindy — she has every reason to. Good friend, solid track record. So she cancels the date without a word of explanation, expecting Ben to connect the dots since he knows she and Cindy are close. But here's the thing: Ben doesn't even like Cindy. He's just nice to her because he wants to be in Sarah's good books. He was never pursuing Cindy. It never happened.

What's broken now is Sarah's trust in Ben — for something he never did. Will she ever find out what Cindy actually did? Probably not. Because Cindy didn't raise her voice, didn't start a fight, didn't do anything that looked like betrayal on the surface. She just planted one sentence and watched Sarah's timeline collapse around it.

That's the lie. Not a confession, not a confrontation — just interference disguised as concern. Cindy was jealous, or was she? She rewrote Sarah's reality without ever getting her hands dirty. 

So what does this small scenario tell us about Cindy? She's a natural liar. Someone who doesn't allow things to take their natural course. Someone with a quiet hatred sitting in her chest — and someone who isn't being true to herself.

But is it jealousy? That's where it gets interesting.

Because here's the thing about lying — the core reason behind it can always be rewritten. Anyone who isn't attuned to their own emotions can shift the narrative, even internally. Cindy could cry to Sarah later and say she was just scared of losing her best friend. She could backpedal and say it wasn't even Ben who asked her out, it was his friend, she was drunk and confused. Suddenly the lie has a softer origin story. Suddenly Cindy is the one who needs comfort.

That's the other layer of this. A liar doesn't just manipulate the people around them — they can manipulate their own understanding of why they did it. The jealousy gets buried under a more digestible excuse, and even Cindy might start to believe her own revision.

I hate liars. I can't tell you how many times I've believed one and got smacked in the face for it.

What is it about me that makes people feel like they can? Somewhere along the line my reality distorted. Words started having different meanings. People started feeling slimy, untrustworthy — like everyone was one conversation away from revealing they weren't who I thought they were.

When you get lied to enough times, you stop trying to untangle it and just focus on surviving whatever they spun you into. You could show them proof, hard evidence, and still walk away feeling like the crazy one. That's the gaslighting on top of the lie. Double insult.

And the cruel irony is that the more I've tried to understand it, the further away the answer gets. I've studied it, lived it, picked it apart — and I still don't fully understand what drives a person to look someone in the eyes and deliberately distort their world. Or even if it’s just by text, hard to decipher. I probably never will understand it.

I have never once found a good reason to lie to anyone. My whole life I've been an open book, sometimes to my own detriment.

But when enough terrible things happen to you, you start lying to yourself. When you've been spun inside so many other people's lies, you start to become one. You absorb it. It gets into you.

I lie to myself when I think I'm special. I lie to myself when I think I look good. I lie to myself when I say I see a future for me in this world. I'm not here lying to you — I'm just finally being honest about how much I've been lying to myself. The difference between my lies and your lies, is that I’m only hurting myself, not you, not others, just me. I’m lying when I say I’m okay, I’m lying when I say nothing’s wrong, I’m lying when I say… I’m lying when I say I love myself, that I care about my life, that I want something more. The truth is, I don’t fucking care what happens to me anymore. 

Lying is a joke to you, a hobby, I’m just lying to keep myself alive.