Hi everyone.

I’m Max, and I’ve been a liar for as long as I can remember. When I was young, I felt helpless about my living situation, and learned to lie to run a way and hide from my problems. Now, despite being an adult and having the power to solve my problems and change my environment, I’ve kept my old habits: deception, avoidance and manipulation. I’ve made a commitment to change this, and I want to admit the biggest lies I’ve told about my past to every person I got close with. These are the Big Five that have shaped the entirely false narrative of who I am. This week I will admit all of these lies to the people close to me, and I’m terrified of how they’ll react. The first time I admit these lies to anyone is here.

1.       My best friend got killed in front of me when I was 7 years old.

This is a complete lie, and never happened. I moved from Russia to Canada when I was 10, and lost contact with all my childhood friends as a result. I decided to make the reality of this situation way more dramatic, and invented a story about how one of them got killed in front of me. I’ve told this tory to all my close friends to invoke their pity and attention. I also used it as an excuse to justify my antisocial behavior. The narrative goes like this:

“My best friend and I (I never gave him a name) were playing basketball behind the building where he lived. There was no actual court, just a rusty metal hoop bolted to concrete exterior of the building. An older kid showed up and told us to scram because he wanted to hoop to himself. I have no idea how old he was. You know how where you’re little everyone bigger than you looks like a giant? For all I know he could have been 13. I went to get my things to leave, but my friend stood up for us. He told him that we were here first, and that it wasn’t fair. They got into an argument, the older kid picked up a brick that was lying on the ground, and hit my friend over the head with it. As soon as he realised what he had done, he took off running and I never saw him again. I watched my best friend lying on the ground, bleeding from his head, motionless. I sat by him in silence and shock for hours until somebody finally found us. When the police came, I could tell them anything useful, and the guy who did this was never caught. I remember every tiny detail about that day: the grass growing through the cracks in the pavement, the piss stains on the side of the building, but there’s one thing I can’t recall. I have no idea what the kid who swung the brick looked like.”

All of this is a complete lie, and I spent a lot of time developing it. I read about selective memory loss which occurs during very traumatic events, and included this detail in my story. I also made sure to include the detail about being a physically small child, and thus having trouble judging the assailant’s age due to our size difference. This story has been the best, most consistent mask I’ve work for YEARS. I told it to anyone who would listen, and planned to tell it to my future children. Not anymore.

2.       I was homeless at 13 and ended up overdosing on cocaine.

My parents went through a very messy divorce at this time, and at one point my father moved his mistress into the house with the rest of our family. I had no idea how to cope with this situation, especially after seeing my mother completely shut down. I got drunk for the first time in my life after stealing Vodka from the kitchen, and snuck out of the house for the night. I climbed a tree in the park close to our house, sat there for maybe an hour, got cold, and went back home. This is not at all how I told the story. The Vodka became “cocaine” and the one hour I spent sitting in the park turned into “3 months being homeless”. The narrative of the story goes like this:

“My father was a very loving man. He had a really big heart, to the point where it was too painful for him to only love one woman at a time. He cheated on my mother their entire marriage, and at one point brought one of his fucking whores home with him. He decided that since the house was in his name, and he was the only one paying bills, he didn’t have to hide his infidelity. Why should he? My mother shut down completely, and I had no idea how to cope with this situation, so one day I just decided to leave. It was December, and freezing outside, and I didn’t even bother to take a jacket. I had no plan, no strategy; I just opened the front door and walked out. I went downtown and begged for change in front of one of the subway entrances, and let me tell you, people WILL step over you to get to the subway in the morning. Nobody gave a fuck. I got by eating street-meat (hotdogs) from the little change people gave me each day. I was very cold, I hardly slept, and very soon became delirious. I lasted for about a week. One day, a dark figure approached me. He was a tall man wearing a black overcoat, and he had long white hair. He was young, in his twenties, but his hair was the thing that stuck out the most to me. It wasn’t that golden-blonde colour; it was just pure, iridescent white. Thinking back to it now, I realise that he must have been completely grey. He asked me if I needed a place to stay, and in my delirium, I concluded that he must be the angel of death. Being 13 and stupid, I thought to myself “this is death coming for me, and I have to go with him now because it’s my time”, and so I went with him. His name was Michael, and he himself grew up homeless. When he saw me sitting by the subway that day, he saw a little too much of himself staring back at him, and so he decided to take me in. He sold coke (cocaine) for a living, and I ended up staying with him for about three months. One night he was getting high with his friends in the living room, and he asked me if I wanted to try some. This man showed me kindness when I was at my absolute lowest, and if ever experience this, that person will become your GOD. I was willing to do anything for him. If he told me to jump off a bridge, and I would be tripping over myself running to the closes bridge I could find. When he offered me coke, I said “of course I want to try some! I want to be just like you guys!” Now, if you’ve ever done coke, you’ll know what that first instance feels like. I doesn’t sneak up on you like booze or weed, it doesn’t start slowly and then builds, it’s like a fucking punch in the face. At that point I hadn’t even tried drinking, so this was a fucking bombshell. I said “of my god, this feels so good, can I have some more?” And they were already high, so they gave me more, and they gave me a lot more, and the next thing I knew everything went black. I woke up in the hospital, and had no idea how I got there. When I OD’ed, Michael and the others realised what the fuck they just did. They were keeping a 13-year-old kid, who wasn’t related to any of them, gave him a Schedule 1 drug, and now he was going to die in their living room. If they got caught, they were looking at possession with intent to distribute, kidnapping, and AT BEST manslaughter, but most likely murder in the 2^nd degree. All of them were looking at 25 to life. They knew they couldn’t call an ambulance, so they carried me as close to the ER as they could, threw me in the snow and ran. The doctors told me my heart stopped and started up three times while laying the snow. The cold is the only thing that saved me because it restricted my circulation and made the body focus on sustaining the vitals. I felt like such a fucking loser when I woke up. I tried running away from home, and failed. I tried doing drugs, and failed. And when I overdosed, I fucking failed at dying! What else could I possibly fuck up? I didn’t say a work to anyone when I came to; just sat there in silence. Any nurse that spoke a second language tried talking to me. They tried Romanian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, you name it; I wouldn’t say a word. A few days in they took dental x-rays and that’s how I got ID’ed . My parents were called, and that’s how I came back into their lives. The entire car ride home they kept blaming each other for what happened to me. Sitting there listening to them, I wished more than anything that had just died. A few months later one of Michael’s friends called me, and told me that Michael got shot in the back and killed in the back of an alley. When he told me this, I felt nothing. I just said “OK” and hug up the phone.”

Just like the previous story, I developed the details of this one over several years. I remember watching a TV show where they were interviewing heroin addicts. One of them said that the first time he tried heroin, it was better than sex, better than anything in his life. He said he spent the rest of his life looking for that one first time, and realise very soon that he was never going to find it, but it didn’t stop him from looking. That’s the description that I based my supposed “overdose” off of. To this day, I have never tried cocaine. I’ve never begged for change, and have never met a man like Michael. I made sure to round out this story by killing him at the end. There are lots of emotional details in this that I spent  a long time thinking about and planning. This lie is not an accident or a slip-up. It’s a carefully constructed manipulation.

For the sake of being considerate to anyone reading this, I won’t include the narratives of the other three lies. As you can see, they are quite elaborate and disturbingly consistent. I’ve internalised them and to a large degree believed my own bullshit. In broad strokes, the other three lies are:

3.       “My friend got killed in a car crash a few days before Christmas while I was sitting in the back seat. We were making a left turn, a drunk driver ran a red light, and we got t-boned.” This is completely false. I have never been in a major car crash. I only learned to drive this year (I’m 28), and felt extremely embarrassed about it. I felt like I failed as a man because I couldn’t drive a car. This story was my excuse as to why I didn’t want to learn. The full version is quite dark and detailed. I even included a detail about how fresh blood feels warm when it hits you, and how surprised I was to learn this because I always thought blood looked “cold” in movies.

4.       “The same week that my friend got killed in the car crash, I got mugged and beat the crap out of my attacker. I knocked out a bunch of his teeth and just left him in the street”. This is also false. I’ve never been mugged or assaulted with any kind of weapon. My girlfriend at the time cheated on me and then broke up with me. I was extremely angry, and ended up punching a steel garbage bin over and over again. I ended up with a scar on my left knuckles, and invented this story to explain it. I wanted to make myself seem like a badass, instead of a dude who snapped and punched garbage bins because he couldn’t cope. Once again, the full version is quite detailed.

5.       “My highschool friend became a king pin dug dealer when he was 25 and I ended up working for him for about a year. I cut ties with him because I was horrified by what he had become”. This story is a gross, gross over-exaggeration of the reality. My friend briefly sold weed when he was in college so he could basically smoke for free. He never made any real money doing it. I ran a few deliveries for him mostly because I felt like it, and never got paid for anything that I did. We were both just a couple of nobodies wasting time and getting high. Instead, I created a Pueblo Escobar type character with many stories of false events that never happened. I lost touch with him after university for no reason in particular. Of my 5 big lies, this one is the most entertaining, and I mostly used to impress and entertain people with interesting anecdotes. It had details like my friend over-paying a line of credit and then using the overpayment credit for expenditures because banks only ever report the credit limit for liability purposes, and the overpayment becomes invisible to tax agencies. Like all my big lies, I put a lot of time and effort into this one, and that detail is actually true of how the banking infrastructure works.

The worst part about my big lies is that I spent so much time working on them. I have no idea how my friends and family will react when they learn the truth. I may end up losing all of them, or they might all chose to forgive me. I’ll know by the end of the week.