Edited by Alloe Mak

If you met me between the ages of eight and twelve, you might’ve thought I had a brother, and you would think so because I would have told you as much. I wanted an older brother badly—one who would tease me and get upset when boys were mean to me, so I made one up. The way I lied was never grand. I knew the littlest, most mundane things about my brother, and I didn’t bring him up often. Casually—only when prompted—as if I didn’t really want to. I made him a small, irrefutable part of my reality. If I were on the phone and was called to do the dishes, I’d say, Sorry, my brother is asking for help folding the laundry, I’ll call you back. If somebody complimented one of my ratty, oversized band t-shirts, I’d say, Thanks, it’s my brother’s. He was studying management at Western, we hardly had pictures together except for when we were kids (if anybody asked to see, which only happened twice, I used photos of me and my older cousin), and the black bike out front was his. His birthday was in April. I even wrote him cards. 

At some point, my brother phased out of reality. I never confessed to the lie; I simply stopped mentioning him in places I normally might have. To some, he might still exist. I’m telling you now he never did. There were dozens of people I made up, once I realised I could. I didn’t hear the term ‘compulsive liar’ until after I’d kicked the habit, but it felt, in a cold sort of way, like finding a shoe that fit just right. It’s about shifting the ‘locus of control’ towards the self, I’ve read; I often lied about bad things happening to me that were only slightly different than the bad things that really did happen, those bad things that I could never dare to speak about. I could channel sympathy for a false ailment into comfort towards a real, secret one. It was hardly ever a fantasy, the way it was with my brother. Even he, I would say, was mean to me; was tragic, and sad, and violent. I was hard-pressed to make up a person who was always kind to me. More likely, I’d invent erratic, codependent friends, whom I hated thinking about. My friends in real life would tell me to cut them off, that they were hurting me, and I’d say I couldn’t. My lies were simple but vast, all-encompassing parts of my life that I kept track of as though they were reality, until they became so.

Eventually, some of the stories I told became so undeniably true to me, and so integral to the me I introduced to other people that it was genuinely difficult for me to remember I’d made it all up. I’d be in the middle of a long-refined story about a friend from ballet or skating—otherwise real settings populated with real people—and then jolt, thinking, oh my God, she’s not real. I lost myself in multiplicities, accidentally finding myself ready to text an imaginary cousin or neighbour, or mindlessly pencilling in a made-up lunch date to my agenda. I lied to my therapist constantly, over months, for no other reason than to see if I could be treated for problems that were not mine. I recall, however, one moment of sudden clarity when I sat with the white-haired, kindly man, recounting some tragedy or other, and stopping myself midsentence to say: “Wait, I’m sorry, that was a lie. I don’t know why I said that.” I was silent for the last fifteen minutes of our session and didn’t go back for a long time. 

I lied about anything you could think to lie about. Mostly, though, I lied about myself. When I was thirteen years old, I auditioned for a high school drama program that I knew I didn’t want to attend, and did the entire audition in a British accent, not correcting the students or teachers who mispronounced my name. I did my monologue in the accent and the interview in the accent, where I answered questions about where I was from and when I’d come to Canada as breezily as giving my home address. I made it into the school, too. I didn’t go, of course, but I wonder—often and pervasively, sometimes obsessively—about the others I auditioned with who did go, each of whom has a memory of auditioning with a girl who doesn’t exist. I wonder if they’d ever said to one another, even once, Do you remember that British girl from our audition? Whatever happened to her? There are so many unreal, functionally dead, practically never alive, girls I’ve left scattered across the world. Girls with names a letter or two off from mine, from places like Galway and Kent, who have lived here for three years or ten, who burst into existence briefly sometimes in coffee shops or comic book stores or train stations, only to quickly dematerialize. I wonder about those Schrodinger selves of mine and the people they befriended. I wonder if anybody misses them. 

In an essay I spend far too much time reciting to my friends, Michael Kinnucan writes that “a tragedy is the story of a human growing into his death mask.” When I was nine years old, I lied to a girl that my parents were divorced. Nearly a year later, they divorced, and it was several years after that when the guilt finally stopped shrouding me. I built my own death mask, I think. I shaped it to my nose and everything, and I was surprised when it killed me. Once, when I didn’t want to dance in my ballet class, I lied and said I felt nauseous even when I didn’t, and I went into the bathroom and sat down on my knees in front of the toilet, and really believed it. I mimed vomiting for an audience of nobody, gripping the toilet bowl and taking deep breaths when I didn’t really need to throw up at all. I spat in the toilet, and I wrapped an arm around my stomach. I very well could have just stood silently in the stall for fifteen minutes and then walked back, but even quietly, even on my own, I needed to live a different life. The odd thing was, after I came back from my false nausea to sit out the rest of ballet class, I really did end up vomiting. It was sudden and true, so I didn’t understand it. I burst up off the ground and just barely pulled the trash bin towards my chest. I preempted myself, and effectively. I lied to get out of quizzes by saying the wire of my braces had popped off, and then quickly forced it off with my fingers and tongue so it would seem real the whole time. I broke off my nails to avoid simply saying I didn’t want to play basketball, and I compelled myself into earaches by sticking my fingers far into my canals. I taught myself to sneeze and cry on command. I screwed on the death mask until it was just me, suffering, and saying it was OK, because it was all only pretend. There is a very thin line between faking it and doing it, and I wore that line like a crown. 

I don’t do this anymore. Not on my own, not to other people. I’m told I should lie more nowadays, really. That I’m honest and blunt and not as fun as I used to be; that I have fewer stories to tell. So be it, I think. But the impulse is like a bruise: tender and pushable. I was in Oxford this July and I told more than one person that I was a master’s student there, just for the fun of it. There are moments, lonely ones, where I imagine the proverbial it of it all could have been different, and I nestle myself in those otherworldly pockets as though hiding in a thornbush. I watched men on the steps of the Bodleian Libraries, smoking in tweed coats, holding large textbooks, and clad in leather satchels, maddeningly envious. It was not that I wanted to be them, then, but that I wanted to have been them, all their lives. 

I don’t want to, nor think I could, pathologize myself. I don’t even know, for the most part, why I did it—saying I’d walked home on the left side of the road knowing it had been the right, saying I’d eaten rice for lunch when I’d really had soup, or inconsequentially yet purposefully changing numbers; saying something was seven dollars when it had been nine, saying I’d been walking for twelve minutes instead of ten. All these inexplicable proofs of my ability to twist reality, or perhaps to convince myself of my existence within it. I am ashamed. It’s not something I like to recall or know about myself. Once you tell somebody you’ve been a liar, there’s no absolution from the possibility you still might be. Believe me—I live with that.