Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: lying

Two seeming opposites can both be true (at the same time)

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One thing that tipped me into thinking I might be autistic is that I have always felt like an alien. I talked about it with an online friend who is autistic, and I said those exact words. “I felt like an alien when I was a kid.”

At the time, I thought it was just because my parents were immigrants who were loath to involve themselves in American culture. Of course, they had to work in American institutions, but they spent all their free time with Taiwanese poeople. Whether it was at church or playing sports or doing karaoke, they did it with Taiwanese people. I knew nothing of American culture all the way through elementary school.

I remember being on the playground during recess, looking around me, and feeling like an alien. I did not know what to do, what to say, or what to think. Kids were doing regular kids stuff like playing on the playground equipment, playing games with each other, or just running around. I tried to mimic what they were doing, but I was in way over my head.

It didn’t help that I was seriously depressed and thought life wasn’t worth living. Or rather, I thought my life was worthless and I shouldn’t be alive. That did not help my feeling of being an alien, and I pretty much gave up on life. At seven.

One thing that bemuses me is the argument between neurotypical people and neuroatypical people over social niceties like the whole ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ ‘Fine, and you?’ exchange that you have to do at work and in many social situations. Neurotypicals say it’s just a ritual that has no literal meaning to it. It’s a phatic exchange, rather than anything with meaning.

I was always confused by this and by how it seemed to go against the admonishment not to lie. In fact, there are many things that seem to go against the decree not to lie. First of all, there’s the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus–two of the biggest lies told to children. Blatant lies. Oh, sure, there were rationalizations for why this was an acceptable lie, but I could not understand why those lies were acceptable, but others weren’t.

Telling your spouse that their clothes doesn’t make them look fat? Acceptable. Saying you love someone you don’t? Not acceptable. Saying you’re washing your hair to not go on a date? Acceptable or not, depending on your point of view.

As a kid, I had no idea which lies were ok and which were not. I learned by intensely studying the kids around me, but that still wasn’t enough. I had no clue how to do the intricate dance that society demands we do on the daily.

That brings me back to the subject of this post–are social niceties lies? I say yes-and I say no.

Let me explain.


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Lying is a form of truth-telling (part seven)

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I’m back with even more musing about lying. Here’s yesterday’s post on the subject, and about a sprinkling about other things, too.

I talked to my mother earlier tonight, and I was hyper-aware of how she was lying to herself. My father has dementia. My mother knows this and tries to get my father to accept it. That’s good! On the other hand, though, she still holds out hope that my father will get better. Many things she does to/for my father (like massaging his head) are with the intent of making him better.

I’m not guessing this, by the way. She’s flat out stated it. She told me about recent meds that seem promising for reversing dementia. The problem is that they only seem to work with people in the early stages of dementia, and they are very recent. we can’t really know how effective they will turn out to be in the end.

I tried to keep my mouth shut, but I am constitutionally unable to not give my opinion if pressed hard enough, apparently. Not that my mother was asking for my opinion, but she would not stop talking about this miracle drug.

Here’s the thing. I learned, from her, ironically, that giving up false hope can bring you great peace. In my case, it was truly laying down the rope (the hope?)  between us. I spend so many decades hoping against hope that there was some way to have a relationship with her. Not even a good one, but one at all.

At some point after my medical crisis, I realized this was never going to happen. Not that it was impossible to happen (in theory), but taht my mother was not ever going to be capable of it.

Side note: She thanked me several times tonight for listening to her. She’s called me her therapist, which I do not like at all. And she’s talked about all these friends of hers who suddenly stopped talking to her. She has no idea why! Which is her lying to herself, but it’s not something I can point out to her.

I also didn’t feel like I could snap back that I really had no choice but to listen to her. Well, I did, but it was a drastic choice. It would mean not talking to her at all. One thing about my mother is that she will push her way until she gets it, and I am not made of strong stuff.

I feel compassion for her as an older person who is on the last leg of her journey here on earth. I feel sorry for her because she has a really rough road ahead of her. I would not wish it on anyone to be the caretaker of someone with dementia. I wish she had gotten into therapy much earlier because maybe these later years would have been easier for her. Not easy because of the dementia thing, but easier.


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The lies I tell myself (part six)

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I have one more post in me about lying, telling the truth, and how the twain shall never meet. This was my last post on the subject, in which I just meandered all over the place.

In this post, I want to talk about how I don’t knowingly lie to myself, but how my anxiety tells me things that aren’t true. For example, when I’m feeling particularly anxious, my brain will tell me that nobody loves me; I might as well be dead; and that no one will care if I’m gone.

Back when I was a kid/teen/in my twenties, I believed this with all my heart. I believed that I was toxic to the world, and that I made it an actively worse place every day I was alive. I believed that I started each day in the hole as far as my impact on it, and I had to dig my way out.

Why? Because I was told every day by my parents (implicitly) that I was a piece of shit who did not deserve to be alive. I’m sure they did not intend for that to be their message, but that was what their message was, indeed.

Or to be even more precise about it, my father’s message was that my brother and I were irritants to him and should not exist. It took me way too long to figure out that my father didn’t really want children; he just assumed he was supposed to have them.

He was big on saving/losing face and he was always worried about looking bad in the community. Ironically, that did not stop him from having flagrant affairs in said community, but I’m sure he managed to rationalize that in his mind somehow.

He was rarely home as he ‘worked’ from early morning to midnight. In truth, he was carrying out his extramarital affairs after work. Everybody knew it, but nobody talked about it. Even when my mother complained to me for hours about her issues with my father, she never explicitly said he was having affairs. At least until MUCH later (like decades later).

She would talk around it, and it was clear that we both knew what she was talking about, but she would not acutally say it. Which was very frustrating, but there was nothing I could really do about it.

My mother, on the other hand, always wanted children, but it was because as she once actually said out loud to me, she wanted someone to love her. And she expected me to be a clone of her. Well, not of her, but of what she thought the ideal woman should be (even though she was not like that herself). It’s the bitter irony of my family’s dysfunction that the matriarchs preached femininity, taking care of your man, and having children, while not actually liking/wanting to do any of those.


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Why I don’t like lying to myself (part four)

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I don’t have a problem lying to other people, but I really don’t like lying to myself. This is another post about truth and lies. Here is my post from yesterday, in which I explored what lying meant to me and why I did not have a problem doing it in certain situations.

There was a post on Ask A Manager from a person who saw their manager having sex in his car with another director of the company (the two were peers and not in each other’s chain of reports). The letter writer (LW) mentioned that they were taking a picture in the parking lot and only later realized they got the tryst in the background. To make matters worse, they knew and adored their boss’s wife, and knew the couple had children.

They didn’t want to do anything about it; they just wanted to know how to forget what they saw. There were a lot of suggestions, and many of them centered on basically gaslighting oneself.

“Tell yourself that you don’t know the state of your manager’s marriage.” “He might be in an open marriage.” “There are more people in open relationships than you know!”

That’s all true. There are more people in open relationships than most people know. However, it’s still not a good idea to shag with your partner at work, even if it’s all out in the open (as it were).

The people in my immediate family are terrible at remembering anything. My brother truly doesn’t remember discussions we had weeks ago. My father, even before his dementia, was tight-lipped about talking about anything in the past. As for my mother, well, let’s just say that she had rose-colored glasses about herself lasered into her eyes. Yes, it’s a mixed metaphor. Deal with it.

She could not bear to think about anything negative around herself, so if a memory showed her in a bad light or made her remember something unpleasant, she deep-sixed it(well, mostly). I realized when I was in my late twenties that I could not count on anything she said. She would outright deny saying hurtful things to me, and it took me another decade to realize that she was telling the truth as she saw it.

She was not lying about not remembering what she had said to me, but it didn’t make it any better for me. I became the unofficial keeper of the family stories, which was not the position I wanted. I had to do it, though, because her denial of reality was wreaking havoc on my sanity.


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Lying liars who lie, part three

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I am a liar. I can admit this here. Not about anything I deem important to people I deem important, which is an important distinction to me. I have said to my friends that I am not a moral person, and they have disagreed with me. They have told me that I’m a very moral person; it’s just that my morals may not line up with society’s morals.

I thought about it, and I had to agree. I have an intensely moral code that I follow, but it’s not the same as society’s. I mention this because my relationship with the truth is part of my moral code. As I was saying in yesterday’s post, I am more about emotional truth than actual truth. And, I care more about being honest with people I love and respect rather than the gen pop or even friends who aren’t super close.

I’ve known this since I was in my twenties. At that time, though, it was more an inchoate feeling rather than a well thought out tenet. And it was heavily wrapped up in my feelings that I was failing at being a good human being. Or any human being at all. I truly thought I was an alien because I had no clue how to be like the other kids. This was in a large part because I was a second generation Taiwanese American with parents who really, really, really, did not want to be in America. Or one of them, anyway. And tried to live as much of a Taiwanese life as possible.

To give them a slight benefit of the doubt, they were fish out of water, too. They didn’t know how American society worked, which meant they could not teach my brother and me how to get along with our classmates.

I didn’t realize at the time that I was neurodivergent (as was my brother, but it was more obvious with him), which would have made such a difference. In today’s Rory and Gav livestream for the producers (a tier of Patreon), it was noted that YouTube gives crowns for people who comment the most and rank the top three. It has to be across all streams because the person who was number one did not comment that much in this particular stream. I was number three for most of the stream, sometimes two.

Gav commented on it, and the person who was number two for most of the stream said how it reminded her of being the kid in school who raised her hand too much (and not in a good way). My friend who was mistakenly thought to be number three said if she had been in the top three, she would have taken it as a reminder that she talked to much. I said that I felt the same way (and so I did not like it).

Gav said it was a good thing and really liked it.


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What is truth and what is lie? (Part two)

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In yesterday’s post, I was talking about when I had no problem lying and when I had to tell the truth. It gets murky because I am not always sure about what is really the truth. Also, memory is expansive, and we know that it changes every time you think about soomething.

I said yesterday that I had no problem with lying about insignificant things. Yes, the hot weather is wonderful. Isn’t it great that it’s summer and the sun is shining? The answers to that is no and yes. Summer isn’t great, but I do like the sun shining–as long as I am inside and the sun is outside.

What else can I lie about? Movies, food, music, TV, and almost anything else pop culture. Hm. Well, I don’t lie, but let’s say I evade, obfuscate, and skirt the truth. I learned in my mid-twenties that many people really do not want to hear anything negative about things they like. I got dumped for not liking Pulp Fiction and saying why I did not like it (only after being asked by my then-boyfriend). He had been so sure I would like it (this was years after it was released, and it was his favorite movie).I had seen the trailer, and I was pretty sure I would not like it. He insisted I would.

I did not. I hated it from the first shot until the very last. I disliked the hypercuts, the slickness, and the glorification of the ultraviolence. Not to mention the rampant sexism and latent racism, and all the other problmatic issues with it.

I tried to be even-handed and diplomatic when I explained why I did not like the movie. After I was done (it took about fifteen minutes), there was complete silence. He had a look of shock on his face, and my heart sank as the silence dragged on. When he spoke, he simply said, “I can’t be with someone who has that world view” and then dumped me.

I have had other people be really upset when I said I didn’t like a movie, a band, a TV show, or anything else. I did not understand that because nobody liked what I liked. If I got into a TV show, for example, it would for sure be canceled within a year.

Because of this, I have no attatchment to what I like. Or rather, I don’t take offense if someone doesn’t like what I like. I would prefer not to have it sneered at, but if someone doesn’t like it and presents thoughtful reasons why, then I’m fine with that.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to cotton on to the fact that many people are deeply invested in the things they like. Once I realized it, I tried to curb my impulse to say what I really felt. It was really hard because it made me feel like I was going backwards into my childhood again.


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The difference between the truth and a lie

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I am neurodivergent. Probably. I have no official diagnosis, but it’s something I’ve slowly come to realize over the past few years. There are many reasons I never considered that I may be autistic, and I want to focus on one of them today. It’s the truism that autistic people can’t lie. They have to tell you the truth, no matter what.

I can lie like the proverbial rug. I can lie glibly and without blinking. I can lie and make you believe it’s the god’s honest truth. There are just many different factors that have to be met in order for me to do that. Or a combination of several of them, if not all.

1. If youu’re a stranger to me or someone I only see in passing, I will lie about all the little things that people consider small talk. An example. I hate the heat. And to me, anything over 70 is hot. I start getting grumpy at around 65 degrees, and if we go over 80, I will be a very unhappy person.

And yet, if someone like a cashier at the grocery store starts talking about how wonderful the weather is and it’s 90 and sunny, I’ll just nod and smile. “It sure is summer!” I’ll say without hesitation. I will never acutally say I’m happy for it to be hot, but I’ll give the impression that I agree.

In this case, it’s a very low-stakes situation with no consequence for lying. I’m not going to have a frank conversation with someone I’m so superficial with. There’s no point, and my brain is fine with this.

By the way, I understand that many autistic people find this difficult because they can’t fathom why they should lie about something so inconsequential. It can fuck them up in the workplace because they don’t understand that small talk is just a social lubricant to keep the wheels spinning easily.

I don’t give a shit about any of it, but I was forced at a very early age to learn how to do it. Not because of society, though that was a byproduct (that I learned how to be socially competent for the most part), but because I became my mother’s emotional support human when I was young (eleven or so).

As a result, I have become very adept at suppressing my own emotions, reactions, and inner workings. So much so, in fact, that I–well, let me back that up a bit.

Ever since I was a kid, I had no idea what I felt. Again, this was because I became my mother’s emotional support human at a young age, but it’s also because, I think, of my neurospiciness. This is a hard one to tease out because I was defeated by life by the time I was seven. I remember realizing that I would die one day and being both terrified by the idea and drawn to it.


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Walking the tightrope

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There is a post today on Ask A Manager on bad ice breakers. In general, I don’t like them (though I don’t have to do them) because at best, they’re bland and boring. At worst, they’re othering and fraught. I mean, “What’s your favorite movie?” is boring for the most part, but for me, it’s fraught because I don’t watch movies any longer. The last movie I watched, I really thought I’d like it–but I hated it. The last movie I watched that I truly liked was Guardians of the Galaxy. Bookwise, I mostly don’t read popular novels because I–well, this is a requirement I have of most of the media I consume. There have to be minorities in it, and not just as tokens. This cuts out a large swath of media. It’s amazing how I can watch a trailer for something and dimiss it in the first ten seconds because it’s, as I’m fond of phrasing it, ‘white people doing white people things’.

It’s one reason I watch cozy competition shows–there are plenty of minorities in the ones I watch. It’s harder to have judges and MCs who are PoC, but there are those as well. It’s one reason I really liked the first season of Next in Fashion (let’s not talk about the second season) because almost everyone on the show was a minority in one way or the other; several were double or triple minorities. I have no interest in fashion, but I have a lot of interest in diversity.

Back to icebreakers.

In the thread, someone mentioned that they had a coworker who was in a coma for two months after she was hit by a car. The teacher in the class asked for an interesting fact about each person, and the coworker, ‘Sandra’, mentioned what happened to her. The instructor was fascinated and asked follow-up questions.

The commenter who posted this story said they asked Sandra if she made the comment on purpose, which Sandra did not seem to undrestand. The commenter suggested not bringing it up agian so as to ‘not freak out the teacher’. They went on to suggest using ‘fun fact’ rather than ‘interesting fact’ to avoid a situation like this, but I was truly puzzled.


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