Why (Do) Did I Lie? An Adopted Person Tries to Tell the Truth. Part 2

I’m still thinking about lying. Trying to name it, understand it, why I did it, why I do it, feels like trying to look at my own marrow.

Partly I don’t want to think or write about lying because I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to feel I have to give it up and I don’t want you to take it from me. 

Listen: lying isn’t even a thing to me—it’s not an it. Lying is woven into the material from which I am made.

In college, I majored in creative writing, and in graduate school I got an M.F.A. in fiction. I essentially lied to earn my degrees. 

In response to a meme I wrote yesterday about lying, Robyn Gobbel, LCSW, wrote that what I was talking about was actually confabulation.  

I’d heard this word, but I’d never used it before. I love it. Confabulation has all the elements of a good time: companionship (con: with), fabulousness (fabula sounds like a good solid root word to joy) and reference to the much loved 80s movie Night Shift (tion: you have to watch the movie to get this part).

Confabulation is actually a symptom of memory disorders where made-up stories fill in any gaps of memory. Confabulation is an important tool for the adoptee. Don’t know who your mother is? Don’t know who your father is? Don’t know where you were for weeks or months or years of your life? Don’t know who first held you? Don’t know if you used to have another name? Don’t know if you were loved? Don’t know if you were wanted? Don’t know what your first meal was? Don’t know who you look like?

Make it all up. 

Nature abhors a vacuum. 

Blank spaces in history make people uncomfortable for a reason: we are a dot-connecting people. The ability to connect dots helps us to feel safe in a wildly spinning world.

Lying (confabulation) (but I am an old-school adoptee at this point: I call my first mom my birth mom and confabulation lying) has felt more about getting things as they should be or should have been than about making stuff up just because I could or because I wanted to misbehave. Like a plumber or an electrician, I am a tradesperson. I am a liar—I fix things. I get them working the way they (in my mind) should.

The thing a lot of people don’t get about the myth of Sisyphus is that half the time that guy was relaxing as he walked down the hill. (Okay, maybe not half the time as it must have taken longer to get up the hill while pushing that boulder than it did getting down without it.) 

The thing a lot of people don’t get about mother-loss babies is that these babies grow into adults who are perpetually, somewhere deep in their mind/body, climbing up the body of the lost mother to the biologically promised reward for surviving the agony of birth: the breast. Sustenance the body recognizes. Home. Safety. 

I lie because I am rageful, heartbroken, starving, and confused. I am also curious, highly manipulative, and full of joy. I am trying to find my footing in a world that has lied to me from the start—You are fine. Nothing important happened. This is your (not really) real family. You are safe. 

But I wasn’t safe because I still carried terror inside of my body and no one could see it. 

Sometimes life is better when I lie: a C becomes an A. Sometimes life is easier: a chore I didn’t want to do was completed. When I lie, I am not all here: I am half out the door. Lying is a way for me to be adopted and not adopted. Me and not me. Here and M.I.A. 

You can not control me, lying says. I am a magician. I can make anything happen.

Having the ability to lie means I will be okay. It means I will be safe.

 Nothing is as it seems. This is so very frightening. The best I can do is to play along. To make it up as I go.

I am testing you.

I am testing the universe.

I am testing, also, myself. I want to see just how much I can get away with, not because I want to, but because I can’t seem to stop.