Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: truth

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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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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The fog has lifted

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One thing about my medical experience is that it really separated the wheat from the chaff. What I mean is that many of the things I was anxious about in the Before (hospital) Times, simply do not matter any longer. It’s hard to talk about it without seeming condescending or as if I’m glossing over legitimate problems. Body issues are real. They are serious. I struggled with them for decades and they have deeply affected me. And I no longer have them.  They completely disappeared during my medical trauma.

Same with any desire to smoke. I smoked two to three cigarettes a day before I landed in the hospital. I did it in quarter to half a cigarette at a time. I never smoked outside the home, meaning I never took my cigarettes out with me. I couldn’t smoke when I was in the hospital, obviously, and I had no desire once I got out. It was as if I had never smoked, and I’ve been a light smoker for decades. I never cared much that I smoked a few cigs a day, nor do I miss it at all.

Then, there are other issues such as family dysfunction that have been exacerbated by the experience to the point of near breaking. I had to realize some hard truths about my family during that time–really sit with them because things are not going to change. All the things I knew about my family but kind of pushed to the back of my mind came roaring to the forefront and refused to be ignored any longer. It smacked me in the face and said that it wasn’t going anywhere so I better learn to deal with it.

First, the rage. Oh, the rage. I’m furious that I was the one who went through a life-changing event (life-threatening!) and my father managed to make it all about him. I’m not surprised by it, mind you, but I just could not deal with it while also dealing with the actual medical trauma itself.  My brain really couldn’t process the thought that he was making it all about him when I had died twice and came back twice. That really underlined that he was incapable of thinking about anyone other than himself. Again, I knew that before I ended up in the hospital, but my medical trauma just emphasized the point and made it impossible for me to ignore it or sweep it under the rug.


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