Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: honesty

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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I hold these truths to be self-evident (part five)

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I’m back to talk more about honesty, lying, having a bad memory, and how I deal with it. Here is my post from yesterday in which I talk about why I hammer out what I remember all the time.

I did it before my medical crisis because of how everyone else in my family deep-sixed experiences left and right. After my medical crisis, I accepted that my memory was markedly worse than it had been before my medical crisis. It was a trade-off I was more than wililng to make because I got more life out of it.

I don’t know if it’s just that or if it’s that and getting older, but my memory keeps getting worse. Fortunately, I can now do simple math in my head again (I could not do it for about a year after my medical crisis), and I no longer forget random words except extremely rarely. But I will completely forget things I would never have forgotten in the past. I have to make notes to myself that I would not have had to make in the past. I don’t like it, but I’ve resigned myself to it.

One thing that really jolted me, though, was when my brother and I had a shared Nelson Mandela moment. We both remembered doing something, and doing it in a very specific way. It turned out to not be true (we had irrefutable proof), and it made me realize that my memory was shakier than ever.

That’s part of the reason that I hold on to my truths as tightly as I can. I know that I’m losing a lot every day, but there are things that I need to keep myself centered.

No matter how much I lie to other people (either directly or by omission), I remain true to myself. I read something once about emotional honesty, which is different than actual honesty. Not to say that you can freely lie whenever you want as long as you can justify it to yourself, but that if a little lie or omission can smooth things out, why not?

I rarely outright lie about things, but I will dance around it. I mentioned in previous posts that I will not rarely speak up when people call me ‘she’ because it doesn’t really matter to me, but I will not call myself ‘she’. I have done it on accident, but I try to avoid personal pronouns for myself as much as possible.

I don’t mind being called ‘them’, but I don’t identify with it. So if someone uses it for me, and they have, I won’t respond. It’s like when I tried to go by a shortened version of my middle name as a kid beaause I did not like my first name growing up. My fifth grade teacher was a prince among men, so he would call me by it–and I would not respond because I had forgotten I had switched my name.


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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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More family dysfunction and the truth

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I am back to talk more about my family. Here is yesterday’s post about my father’s problems with his memory. I have saved my mother for last because as usual, it’s the most complicated and entangled relationship. My brother and I get along great, and I don’t worry about annoying/hurting/bothering him because he’ll never remember it if I am. My father is my father, and it was pretty clear from when I was a kid that he was self-absorbed narcissist who would never care about anyone but himself. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he didn’t even love himself. That’s why he kept grasping for anything to fill the empty hole in his soul. Deep gaping maw.

Because he was so badly broken, it was easy to say, “This is a him problem, not a me problem.” It was different with my mother. Why? Because she can act like an actual human being. A deeply flawed one, yes, but one with ties to this actual world. Yes, that’s a dig on my father, and not even a subtle one.

This is where societal norms come in. I am from two cultures that venerate parents to an unhealthy degree, albeit in very different ways. In America, we give such lip service to family and how pro-family we are. We are not, which is probably not a shocker to anyone, but it’s a great sound bite. Mothers are special! Mothers love their children without restraint and will do anything for them!

On the other hand, Taiwanese culture is (or was, at least) about venerating your elders to a ridiculous degree (yes, I’m saying that with an American bias). You call your relatives different names based on their status in the family. What I mean is big brother has a different title than younger brother, for example. There is a very complicated heiarchy as to who is venerated the ost. Grandparents, then father, then mother, then sons…wait. Sons may go before mother. Girls are really treated like shit. Or at least they were. My knowledge is decades old because my parents have not evolved at all since the sixties.

Both of these fucked with my head because the underlying message was that there was no bad parents. Again, for different reasons. In America, it aligned with the toxic positivity that is so prevalent in this country. Parents are the best! Parents are all good and only want good for their children! (But, again, we will not do anything to support parents. Shhhhhh!)


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