LIVING IN A PACK OF LIES

Recognising that it is our culture helps us to change it

Jan 25, 2023

The moment of my birth created doubt and confusion for my mother. She was convinced that I was not her baby and rejected me, saying that I had the wrong colouring and had been swapped, somehow by someone, for reasons unknown.

If ever there was a portent for the way my life would unfold, that was it.

When I was just four years old, a neighbour tried to influence my young mind by showing me a pornographic pack of cards. The violent way that my parents reacted taught me a strange lesson. It taught me to avoid telling them the truth.

At infants school I witnessed a teacher smacking a five year old’s knuckles with a ruler because he had answered honestly when she asked him why he had coloured certain letters of the alphabet in his school book. “It makes them look pretty!” he had said and quickly learned that truth was unacceptable.

At junior school a teacher humiliated a class mate by showing the entire class a stain on his gym shorts. A stain which I know now would indicate that he had been sexually abused and his anal sphincter was stretched and slackened. At the time, I only saw the child crumple, completely broken. I witnessed his misery and learned to hate that teacher, especially when she heaped praise on me. She never understood why I could not trust or believe her.

I was deceived into visiting a psychiatrist when I was nine years old, just because I wrote strange poems and drew apocalyptic scenarios in my secret book. I was pronounced ‘gifted’ but it always felt hollow because, by then, I was sure that all adults lied, all the time.

They lied to their children about trivial things, like where gifts came from at Christmas. They went to church and lied to me about a ‘being’ they feared. They worked in jobs that required them to lie all day long - pretending to be someone they were not, just to get paid at the end of the week. They told stories between themselves, most of which were untrue. They read newspapers which traded entirely on spinning lies and creating division.

When a television appeared in our home, I withdrew to read in my bedroom but the books that my family gave me were fiction. The children’s comics, the same.

I begged for a set of encyclopaedias and when I studied them, I saw that history was a fiction agreed upon, science no better and even art was concealing the truth, yet claiming to capture it.

Becoming an adult was not just a matter of physically maturing, it was learning to lie like everyone else because, if I did not, I would be rejected, ostracised and possibly much worse, labelled insane and locked up like poor Mrs Rochester in the classic book Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

And so commenced my adulthood, armed with all the consummate skills I had witnessed around me, honed to perfection and described on crisp sheets of paper in a curriculum vitae which represented someone I was not, but who would potentially fill the lying role I was applying for.

Over the years I pretended to be all sorts of people. I pretended to be expert about modern music when I worked behind the counter of Woolworths record department. I pretended to be a smart, efficient secretary at Fords Motor Company and I pretended to understand autistic children at the local Doctor Barnardo’s Home. All this, in part-time work experience, before I left school, where I lied about my ambitions and hopes for the future!

As soon as I extricated myself from education I lied for an Estate Agent, then an Electrical Contractor who wanted someone pretty to act as his receptionist. I lied to his wife when she phoned to find out where he was. And so on, and on….

I became particularly good at lying to myself.

I told myself that I was unattractive because I was not stick thin like Twiggy in the 60s. I convinced myself that I would meet a good guy, get married and live happily ever after. I believed that if I concealed my overwhelming depression behind a happy smile, nobody would ever know that I was so acutely aware of all the lies.

I pulled it off until I gave birth and that was when I realised, with a jolt, that I did not want to lie to this child. I was determined that this child would know the truth, as far as I could find out what the truth was….. not an easy task in a culture of liars!

And now?

The lies around us are even more overwhelming than ever before. We are punished if we do not believe them but joy over joy, I see that lots of people are objecting to the lies and devoting their energy to exposing them. This is progress, don’t you agree?

So, to end on a cheerful note, I am adding some fine examples of telling the truth in the face of a culture of lies: