compulsive liar illness — 1 thorough investigation

the ikea aisles are full of beds for lives i could narrate but not live. compulsive liar illness, the page insists, is a real category. the voicemail is still full. the receipt wallet is still fat. the third yoga mat is still rolled. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. tom would have agreed, briefly, for an audience.

at the desk, tuesday, mid-morning. carla is upstairs at a training on the third floor with a colour-coded folder, which means she came in expecting to take notes, not to take fire. i have, on the clock, about an hour before any of that is my problem.

so. compulsive liar illness. the phrase showed up in my search bar last weekend, while i was technically wandering an ikea showroom and technically not buying anything, and it lodged in my head the way phrases do when one of the words is on loan from a softer aisle. “disease” sounds like a hospital. “illness” sounds like a bathrobe. somebody changed the word on purpose, and the new word is doing different work.

that’s the first thing i would put on the wall, if the wall in this apartment had any room left, which it does not. illness is a costume one notch laxer than disease. disease implies something happened to you. illness implies something is happening to you, gently, and you would prefer not to be disturbed. people picked the second word because the first one was too loud. i know this because i pick the second word for almost everything, including my own situation, and i live, structurally, near the bottom of the rung-chart of liar-adjacent words i keep updating in my head.

compulsive liar illness, the version drafted in ikea

i was not, in fairness, looking for the phrase. i was, on a sunday afternoon, walking the bedroom showroom at ikea, which is the closest thing in this city to a free museum of lives i will not be living. each room in there is a small, fully-staged lie. a bed for a couple. a desk for a writer who finishes things. a kitchen for a person who hosts. i pay no admission. i drift through. i exit through the warehouse, where the lies become flat boxes you carry home and assemble into the lie.

i had my phone out — not, i would like to say, to take pictures of the rooms, which would be embarrassing, but to look up the difference between two phrases somebody had used at me, in a previous conversation, on a previous evening. one was the working definition of a pathological liar, which i had already filed. the other was compulsive liar illness, which i had not. and there it was, halfway between the kallax aisle and the throw cushions, lit up at the top of the autosuggestions like a verdict in a softer font.

the page i tapped through to was, broadly, a wellness post in a calm beige template, with the kind of paragraph breaks that suggest somebody has thought hard about the reader’s nervous system. it called the behaviour an “illness” five times in the first two hundred words. it did not, at any point, call it a behaviour. that is, in my own audit, the move. the page was not lying to me. the page was, however, very carefully not naming the thing.

i closed the tab in the showroom of a kitchen i’m not having. i made a mental note to write this. the mental note has, by my reckoning, been delayed three days, which is, in the longer field guide to where pathological lying actually starts, well within the budget for what i would still call ordinary procrastination, not symptoms.

tom would not call it an illness, he calls it a flaw

this is where tom comes in, mostly because tom would, if he were on this thread, have an opinion. tom — university friend, owner of a house, owner of a wife, owner of two children, owner of a volvo with seats that adjust in directions i have never personally needed — does not use the word illness for behaviour. tom uses the word flaw. it’s an older word. it’s a less padded word. it’s a word that puts the behaviour on the person without putting the person on a stretcher.

i remember a conversation with tom, on a porch, in 2021, about a mutual friend who had, at that point, told three different versions of the same workplace story to three different rooms. tom said, draining the second beer of the evening, “the man’s got a flaw. it’s a small one. he’s not ill. he’s just got a flaw.” that was the whole diagnosis. it was, on a strict reading, more useful than anything the wellness post in the kallax aisle managed in eighteen paragraphs. tom is, in his way, a working epidemiologist of borrowed nouns.

the difference between “flaw” and “illness” is, structurally, the difference between a budget item and a hospital admission. a flaw you address, occasionally, when you have the energy. an illness you wait out, ideally with somebody bringing you tea. one assumes agency. the other assumes the sofa. people who like the word “illness” — and i have, on tuesdays, been one of them — are, broadly, people who would like the sofa option to be available a little longer.

A. PATTERN. IS. NOT. A. BATHROBE.

for a literary reference of a man who decided his lying was, in fact, a settled illness rather than an open routine, the patrick bateman character in american psycho diagnoses himself early and often. self-diagnosis, in his case, becomes the architecture. the line is sharper than the doctor.

the voicemail as symptom, technically

i would like to walk through, for the record, the closest thing to a “symptom” i can produce on a tuesday. it is the voicemail. the voicemail has been full since approximately august of last year. it is, by the most generous reading, a kind of involuntary noun: it is full because i have not emptied it, and i have not emptied it because every time i open the app, i feel a small clinical tightness in the chest that, if i were on the wellness page i closed in the showroom, i would absolutely be encouraged to call symptomatic.

so let’s audit. is the full voicemail an illness? is it a flaw? is it a habit? is it a strategic lie of omission? on the rung-chart, where does it sit?

illness implies it happened to me. it did not. i set the voicemail box up, in 2014, with a greeting in a voice i would now describe as embarrassingly upbeat. flaw implies a small, persistent failing in my character. that’s closer. habit implies i do this regularly, which i do — the voicemail has, in fact, been at full capacity twice before, and twice before i emptied it during a rare functional weekend. and lie of omission implies that the caller, in being told i’m unreachable, is being given a useful inaccuracy. that’s accurate. all four words apply, in graduated weight. only one of them — illness — is dishonest about the situation.

this is, broadly, the move people make when they reach for the word compulsive liar illness. they take a behaviour with four valid descriptors and pick the one that lets them sit on the sofa the longest. i do not blame them. i would do it. i did do it, on sunday, in ikea, until the autosuggestion bar talked me out of it.

the third yoga mat as side effect

another candidate symptom, which i will name and then, in fairness, dismiss: the third yoga mat. the third yoga mat lives, rolled, behind the sofa, in the position it has held since the first week of 2024. it has, in that span, been used four times. once for yoga, once as a foot rest, once as a temporary draught-stopper under the front door, and once, embarrassingly, as a backdrop in a photograph i was taking of a receipt for an expense claim.

is the mat a symptom of compulsive liar illness? on the wellness page’s terms, it would absolutely qualify. the mat was bought during a moment of intent that i no longer remember having. the intent was, broadly, a lie i told myself about a yoga practice that has, on the books, never started. the mat is, in that sense, the physical residue of a lie i told to a credit card on a tuesday afternoon.

but a side effect of a behaviour is not the same as a symptom of an illness. the mat is residue. residue is what you call the things a habit leaves behind. it is, on the kitchen counter, evidence. it is not, technically, a fever. and a kitchen full of evidence is not a clinic. it is a kitchen.

this is where the language of illness starts to get expensive. once you accept the word, every object in the apartment becomes a piece of clinical inventory. the voicemail is a symptom. the mat is a side effect. the receipt wallet, fat with paper i have never sorted, is a chronic indicator. the unopened mail pile, leaning gently against the door, is structural. before you know it, the apartment is a hospital ward and the only person on staff is a man at a desk on a tuesday morning trying not to think about it.

when “illness” is fair, and when it is escape

i would like, in the spirit of fairness, to note where “illness” actually earns the word. there are presentations of compulsive lying — sustained, distressing to the liar, attached to other behaviours the liar finds genuinely involuntary — where the word “illness” is, broadly, accurate, and where the appropriate response is a room with a professional in it. that is the right room. it is not this room. it is also not, at the risk of being honest, a room ikea sells furniture for.

but most people who type compulsive liar illness into a search bar are not heading to that room. they are sitting on a sofa, or in a parked car, or, in my case, halfway through a showroom display of a life they will not be assembling, and they are looking for a noun that lets the behaviour off the hook for one more weekend. i recognise the search. i was, on sunday, doing exactly that search, except i had the advantage of recognising the move as i made it. that does not make me clean. it makes me a man with a slightly better-curated sofa than he had at the start of the post.

the test, broadly, is this. if calling the thing an illness gets you to a room with a professional, the word has earned itself. if calling the thing an illness gets you another six months on the sofa with the voicemail full, the word has cost you. those are not the same word doing the same work. they are the same word doing different work in different houses. and most of us, in my unscientific reckoning, are paying the second rent.

verdict, my illness is a routine with branding

so here is the verdict, drawn at the desk, with the training still going on the third floor and the receipt wallet bulging by my elbow like an organ i would, in a wellness aisle, be told to detoxify. compulsive liar illness, as a phrase, is mostly a search term that lets a behaviour wear a bathrobe. it is not, in the way a working doctor would use the word, a category. it is, in the way a working sunday-afternoon search engine uses the word, an invitation.

i am, by my own count, not on the heavy end of any rung. i lie strategically, occasionally, mostly to landlords and to phone calls i don’t pick up. i tell my mother on sundays that i’m fine when i am, on a strict reading, slightly under fine. i tell the receipt wallet i’ll sort it on the weekend, and the weekend has, by now, been three years deep. those are habits with reasons. they are not symptoms. they are not, broadly, an illness. they are, on the rung-chart, a routine with branding.

the branding is the expensive bit. the routine is free. it is in fact, on a tuesday morning at this desk, doing the work of keeping me functional through a training carla is taking notes in. i have no quarrel with the routine. i have a quarrel with the bathrobe.

training let out early. carla is back, the colour-coded folder is closed, and a small pastry has appeared on her desk that did not, by any of the official channels, exist twenty minutes ago. i interpret this as carla having been the most useful person in the room, which she usually is.

the receipt wallet, by my elbow, is — by quick count — eighty-one receipts thick. i can see, peeking from the spine, the corner of a receipt for the third yoga mat from january 2024. the wallet has not been opened since i, in a bout of sunday optimism, pretended to organise it on a sofa during the same sunday i drifted through the kallax aisle. the optimism, on the books, lasted about ninety seconds.

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