Lies: My Lies

I have told a lot of lies. I have lied to strangers, loved ones, enemies, and myself. I am a very good liar. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? It is hard to say. I have survived when I might have died. But I have scars (in and out) that I did not need to gain.
For many years I told myself I was guilty of being abused. I told myself I had not been abused, that it had not been violent so it must have been consensual. These were lies, and I should have known better, but I was willing, for whatever reason, to believe that I was a horrible pervert. I believed that for some reason I deserved to be abused.
For many years I lied to everyone around me. I made a persona of a perfect little Baptist girl, one who participated in ministry extensively, who counseled her peers, who was strong and confident in her faith. My persona won Christian character awards, She was held up as a standard of Christian excellence. She never doubted, never struggled with her salvation, never spent the night in tears of agony. But she was a mask, nothing more. The real me was nearly her opposite. I was a Christian, to be sure, but I was by no means as confident or assured or good in that Christianity as outward Threnody let on. I struggled with depression. I had no real friends, no one I could even think of confiding in. By turns I hated and adored my God; by turns I served him and turned my back on him. Yet outwardly, my persona was a friendly, perfect, somewhat introverted Christian girl.
When I went to college I made a new mask, but I wore it just as well as the last one. College Threnody was no longer introverted; she had realized introverts are very lonely. So she became a bubbly person. She became the joker, the class clown, the prankster, always good for a laugh. And college Threnody gathered to herself friends. For the first time she was part of a group of friends, and that felt spectacular. Except...college Threnody was just as much a mask as high school Threnody, and the friends that college Threnody had gathered were friends with a lie, with someone who didn't exist. Meanwhile, I was still lonely, I still had no one to confide in. But who could I trust? And who would trust me? Confiding in someone was essentially the same as admitting I had been lying to everyone for a very long time. I tried counseling, but as I was unable or unwilling to ever completely drop the masks I wore, it didn't really go anywhere. I never lied to a counselor (save once) overtly, yet they did not see beyond the mask of passive lies I always wore. Sometime in there I began accumulating scars. College Threnody of course gave no sign of these; she could sit and joke and laugh and hold punching wars with her friends and never let on that I had been bleeding minutes before. If she wore boots and long sleeves long past what would have been normal, well, no one remarked on it or found it strange.
I talk much of masks, for that is how I have always referred to the myriad lies I told and acted. I am proud of my masks; they held up to the scrutiny of many people for many years. Of course that is not hard to do; people see what they wish to see. I need only set their minds on the track I wish them to take and their own preconceived ideas do most of the work. A few people saw through my masks, or at least parts of them. And yet, given a glimpse of the troubled, hurting soul inside, it was still easy to weave a new mask of their discovered truth and new lies. People do not know what to do with other people's pain, and so if given a chance, they are more than willing to ignore or discount that pain.
I fear I have drifted off track a little. I apologize. The point is that I am very familiar with lies and lying. Nowadays I try to do less of it, but sometimes I still must, both for my own sake and the sake of those I love. Even now I am wearing a mask. I have told very few people what is is. It is a fairly recent mask, in some ways. In others, it is as old as I am. Thankfully I will not be wearing it much longer. For all its brevity, it is probably the biggest mask I have ever worn. Deciding to take it off is perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done. That is saying something, as those of you who know even a little of my life should know. What is it? I will tell you soon.

This is Part Three of the series "Lies." Part Four, "The Biggest Mask," can be found here.