There’s no excuse for lying. Unless, of course, you happen to have a very good reason for it. I mean, if you had to lie in order to save a man’s life, who could possibly judge you for that? Or if your lie rescues an innocent person, it must be okay, right? You can lie to protect your family, and keep a roof over their head and food in their bellies. You can lie to lift a person’s spirits. Or to give them a little nudge in the right direction. There are so many reasons to lie, and just as many not to.
But what happens if you lie because you just can’t help yourself?
What if lying is too deeply ingrained in your personality?
It has become your bread and butter. It supports your health and your sanity. Lying is your life. You construct a world around you with all the love and affection of a first-time parent caring for their new-born baby. You start to imagine characters with more substance than many of the people around you, with their forced smiles and obligatory comments about the weather.
In the end, your life comes to revolve around the lies that you spin.
It’s all you know. That imaginary world just makes more sense than the real one. And so, day after day, month after month, year after year, you record all of your lies and turn them into something greater than yourself. After so much time has elapsed, you’ve suddenly forgotten what it’s like to live outside of fiction.
You’re a storyteller.
A professional liar.
You have the ability to create the most convincing and elaborate lies for others to read and analyse and enjoy. Alright, so fiction isn’t a lie per se. Most people who read fictional stories are aware of the fact that what they’re reading isn’t real, and most writers (well, the ones who have morals) don’t try to pass off their fiction as a true story. But still, it takes a pretty convincing lie for another person to get so completely absorbed in it.
It takes a skilled liar to create a world from nothing.
Readers may spend hours perusing the finer points of your lies. You begin to grow more and more attached to that fictional world, until one fateful day when you realise that you’ve spent more time in that world than the real one. The power of creation has the ability to consume you. And when you yield the power to create your own worlds, you’ll suddenly find that there’s no reality left for you to lose.
~ Ekaterina
Writing on Tangents 