therapy for habitual liars — 1 investigation

the barista asked if i wanted the usual and i said yes despite never having ordered there. therapy for habitual liars, the table promised, includes the subscription audit i started in march and the receipt wallet i have not closed since. pineapple on pizza is, also, a treatment for something. i am not sure for what.

i am writing this from the desk at 11:23, the rest of the morning still in front of me, the espresso cup from the coffee shop drying in a ring on a coaster i was given as a joke. carla is on the third floor in the annual planning meeting that always overruns because the slides have animation. that buys me a generous window to put a clinical word next to a domestic one and see which of them flinches first.

therapy is a heavy word. liar is also a heavy word. when you set them on the same shelf the shelf bends. i set them down anyway, because the search bar is not embarrassed by what it asks me, and i have stopped being embarrassed back. the table is the format. the desk is the venue. the espresso is on the coaster, where it will probably remain.

1. therapy for habitual liars, the table version

therapy for habitual liars, the way the longer pieces use the phrase, is supposed to be a clinical setting with a clinician and a chair that reclines. the version i have access to is a desk chair that does not, a barista who sells me an order i did not invent, and a list of small routines i can run without filing paperwork. i call it therapy because the word, used loosely, fits. i call it a table because the table is what the search engines reward. for the broader taxonomy of who exactly counts as a liar in the first place, the pillar investigation about being a liar is the page i keep tab-six open on.

the weights are mine. i made them up at the coffee shop while the barista was warming a croissant for someone else. clinical-ish weight means how much it sounds like therapy when you describe it without context, which is the only metric the internet really cares about. the receipt wallet scores higher than the audit because the wallet is a noun a person can hold up. an audit is a verb a person can lie about doing. nouns win.

for the cross-cluster reading on why people who lie often score themselves as mediocre liars, the dunning effect is the relevant one — a brief on the dunning-kruger effect covers the gap between perceived skill and actual skill in painful detail. habitual liars usually believe they are average liars. they are not. dunning has notes on this. kruger does as well.

2. the barista handed me coffee mid-thought

the barista is the closest i come to a regular relationship with a stranger. she does not know my name. i do not know hers. she knows my order, or she knows an order, and the gap between those two facts is where therapy for habitual liars actually lives. she asked if i wanted the usual. i said yes. there is no usual. a small lie, friction-free, and we both went on with our mornings as though i had a usual. that is the entire mechanism, performed at the counter, before nine.

here is the clinical-ish part. i did not invent a story to cover it. i did not perform a justification. i let the lie be small and i let it dissolve in the espresso, where most lies of this size go to die. the routine, if you can call it that, is to notice it, name it on the walk back, and not write it down. writing it down would make it a project. projects are where small lies grow into the sort of essay the working definition of a compulsive liar needs whole paragraphs to describe.

the barista, noted on a foolscap somewhere, is not part of the therapy. the barista is the trigger. the therapy is the walk back, the noticing, the not writing. that is the order. when the order goes the other way, the espresso wins and i lose the morning.

3. therapy one, the subscription audit i should cancel, instead i looked at it

the subscription audit started in march. the audit is a spreadsheet. the spreadsheet has a tab called *cancel* and a tab called *keep* and a tab called *think about it*. the *think about it* tab is the longest. it has been the longest since march, which is the diagnostic. a habitual liar’s audit is not the audit. it is the third tab, the one where the small lies go to wait for a decision that will not arrive.

this morning i looked at the audit, opened the *think about it* tab, and added two new rows. i did not delete any. i did not move any. i did not cancel anything. i closed the spreadsheet with the small satisfaction of having performed the audit, which is what the audit is for. it is therapy because the act of looking is what the longer pieces describe as the entry point. it is also a lie, because looking without acting is the precise mechanism the audit was supposed to interrupt. both are true. that is the whole point of the row.

4. therapy two, the receipts that contradict me

the receipt wallet has not closed since the second of march. it does not close because there are too many receipts in it, and i refuse to throw any away because each receipt is a small fact about a morning i may want to revise. that is the function. a habitual liar keeps the receipt wallet for the same reason a witness keeps a notebook. not to remember. to be able to check the version they decide on later.

the receipts in there now: one for the espresso this morning (the one with the ring on the coaster), one for the croissant i did not buy but said i did, one for the corner shop where i told mom on sunday i had not gone, three for the supermarket, one folded so badly it could be from any year. i ran my thumb over the supermarket trio and the wallet flexed open another quarter inch. the wallet is, by my own estimation, a four-month receipt wallet pretending to be a one-month receipt wallet. that is also therapy. the pretending is the practice.

i looked it up at 9:18 last night to make sure receipt-keeping counted as a clinical-ish technique, and the literature i’m fairly sure exists has a name for it that is longer than receipt wallet. on this desk it is the receipt wallet. it is what it is. a spoon is a smaller bowl. a wallet is a smaller drawer. on the same shelf as the drawer of certified letters.

5. therapy three, the missed appointment, which is also a kind of therapy

the missed appointment was last week. it was a real appointment, with a real person, in a real room with the kind of upholstered chair the word therapy actually deserves. i did not go. i did not call to cancel. i let the appointment pass the way you let a microwave clock blink twelve hours after a power cut. the seventh microwave, noted, is the one that does the blinking now, the one i have not adjusted since it was delivered, the one whose blink i factor into my reading of the kitchen light at night.

the therapy in the missed appointment is the missing. specifically, the noticing of the missing. specifically, the not-lying-about-the-missing afterwards. when a friend asked how the appointment went, i said i did not attend. that sentence cost me about four seconds of social discomfort and bought me a week of internal quiet. the math, on this row, favors the truth by a comfortable margin. that is rare enough that i am noting it down here, before the spread regresses.

the connoisseur of the genre would say the missed appointment is a test of how a habitual liar handles an opportunity to lie cleanly. i passed. i am noting the pass. i may relapse by friday. the table accommodates relapse. the table is the only thing on this desk that does.

6. verdict, my therapy is a routine in different clothes

the verdict is straightforward. therapy for habitual liars, the way it lives on my desk, is five small routines wearing a clinical word as a costume. subscription audit nobody acts on. receipt wallet nobody closes. missed appointment nobody chases. pineapple defended at the counter. espresso ring widening on a coaster. five rows. one foolscap. zero clinicians. the costume is the only difference between this and what i was already doing.

here is the part the table cannot hold. the costume matters. wearing a clinical word changes how a habitual liar treats the routine, even when the routine is identical to the un-costumed version. i wash the espresso ring with more attention because the row i wrote down said the ring was therapy five. i opened the *think about it* tab without flinching because the row called it therapy one. the word changes the chair under you, even when the chair is the same desk chair you already had. that is the whole finding. that is the table’s only honest column.

and the hot take row, since you are still here. pineapple on pizza, defended at the counter, is therapy four. i defend it once a quarter to whoever orders next to me. the defense is the routine. the routine is the therapy. the therapy is the costume. the costume, in this case, is a baseline opinion held with more conviction than the situation requires, which is a transferable skill for a habitual liar trying to learn what conviction without invention sounds like. you can find the broader spirit of cheerful, low-stakes contrarianism in the kind of unproductive travel television documented on imdb’s record of an idiot abroad, which is unrelated and entirely related at once.

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