pathological lying treatment — 1 fairly sure investigation

the supermarket cart squeaks like a confession i did not write. pathological lying treatment, the listicle said, begins with a list. my list is the unopened mail pile and the subscription audit i keep almost finishing. all chairs are bar stools. all aisles are pulpits. one of those is, on a good day, true.

i took the squeak personally on the walk over. i now sit, properly, with the supermarket receipt folded into the receipt wallet that is, technically, a money clip i never use for money. carla is upstairs in an annual planning meeting, and the rest of the morning is mine to theorise.

at the desk. carla is in the annual planning meeting on the third floor. door closed. i estimate i have until 8:14am before the elevator gives her back.

the supermarket trip earlier produced two onions and a pack of batteries. the onions are aspirational. the batteries are for the smoke alarm i unplugged in march.

1. pathological lying treatment, the supermarket list

i made the list on the back of the receipt while waiting for a card reader to remember its job. pathological lying treatment, as i understand it from a lazy half-hour with the kind of articles that wear bullet points like a uniform, is not one thing. it is the working list. five or six items, repeated until the lying gets bored.

the items i could remember, walking the cereal aisle and pretending to read labels, were these. one, talk to a person whose job it is to listen and not to be impressed. two, keep a small log, written by hand, because handwriting is slower than the lie. three, identify the trigger — fear, gain, kindness, or sheer habit. four, agree on a follow-up question with one person you trust. five, give the lie nothing to chase. six, remove the audience for a while if the audience is the whole point.

i wrote that down on a strip of paper that is now in the working chart of who is lying and to which audience, which lives, like most of my organisational systems, in a folder on the desk that i refer to only when the folder is on top. the folder is currently second from the top. that is, by my running standards, organised.

the chart, when i can find it, is honest about one thing. treatment is not a thing you do once. it is a posture you adopt and forget and adopt again. the supermarket list is, on a good week, the posture written down where the cart can see it.

2. treatment one, the unopened mail pile, audited monthly

the first item on my own version of the list is the unopened mail pile. it is, as of 12:14pm this morning, eleven envelopes thick. four red. one certified. a treatment plan that does not include the pile is, for me, a treatment plan written by someone who has never been to my apartment.

the pile is a lie of omission with a postal code. each envelope is a small piece of information about my actual life that i have agreed, by inaction, not to absorb. opening the pile is, mechanically, the first treatment. i do it once a month. i have done it three times this year. by my own audit, that is acceptable. by everyone else’s audit, it is not.

here is the small protocol. on a monday, i pull the top half of the pile, sort it into “bills”, “letters from people who already have my email”, and “objects whose envelopes are coloured to scare me”. the third stack i open last, with a glass of water, because the colour is doing work. the colour is part of the treatment. pathological lying treatment, in my house, includes envelope colour theory.

i don’t open the certified one. the certified ones live in a drawer i think of as the abroad drawer, on the assumption that the drawer is a country i have not yet visited and may, with luck, never have to.

the audit, when it happens, is the closest thing i have to honesty with myself in writing. i recommend it. i don’t recommend mine specifically. mine is, on a strict reading, eight months behind.

3. treatment two, the subscription cancellations i think about

the second item is the subscription audit. i think about it more than i do it. thinking about it, i have decided, counts for partial credit, the way thinking about going to the gym counts on the day you do not.

here is the working list of subscriptions i am actively, mentally, considering cancelling: a streaming service i used twice in november, a meditation app i opened on the day i installed it, a magazine that arrives, a second streaming service that exists because of a bundling deal i did not understand, a backup cloud storage on top of a primary cloud storage, and a wine club that sends a bottle each month from stefan the wine man, who selected it personally, allegedly.

the wine, in fairness, has been the only one earning its keep. the others are, financially, a kind of lying. i lie to myself about how often i meditate. the meditation app collects six dollars and ninety-nine cents on the eleventh of each month, regardless of whether i lied better that month. the app, in this sense, is a referee. i am paying it to keep score.

the audit is the second item on the treatment list because lying about money is the lie i am most fluent in. it does not feel like lying. it feels like postponing a small administrative task. but the postponement, repeated for two years, is the lie. the dollars and ninety-nine cents have a name. the name is i meant to.

4. treatment three, the receipts in the wallet, sorted briefly

the third item is the receipts. i keep them in the receipt wallet, which is, again, a money clip without money in it. the receipts go in chronological order — that is the lie. the receipts go in the order in which i remembered to put them in, which is most of them, and a small percentage end up in coat pockets.

the sort, when i do it, is on a thursday between meetings. i lay them out in front of the keyboard at 2:14pm and try to match each one to a memory of the day. some receipts are easy. the supermarket one from this morning, for instance, is the onions and the batteries and a small disappointment about the cost of batteries. some receipts are harder. there is one from a coffee shop on a saturday in february where i cannot, for the life of me, account for myself.

the sort is part of the treatment because lying, in my version, often happens in the gap between what i did and what i remember. the receipt closes the gap. the receipt is the witness who shows up sober. treatment, in this case, is the small physical act of looking at a piece of paper that knows where i was when i would rather not.

i do this monthly. i have done it twice this year. that is a number i would, in conversation, round up.

5. treatment four, the chair, which is now a bar stool

the fourth item on the list is, to my surprise, a chair. specifically the chair in the corner of the kitchen that started life as a regular dining chair and is now, by virtue of where i put it and what i put on it, functionally a bar stool with delusions.

the 1997 film about a lawyer who, by way of a birthday wish, cannot lie for twenty-four hours is, technically, a treatment plan with a magic-realism delivery system. nobody is going to wish me into a day of honesty. the chair is more realistic. the chair holds a stack of receipts, an empty glass, and a paperback i have been reading for fourteen months. the chair is, in its way, a confession.

this is where HT16 comes in. all chairs are bar stools eventually. what they mean by it, in the kitchen, is that any chair left in a kitchen long enough collects glasses, post, and the tail end of a conversation with yourself. the chair is the tail end of fourteen months of conversation. the chair is, on the treatment list, item four because looking at the chair is the cheapest way to know what i have actually been doing with my evenings.

the treatment, here, is to look at the chair and not lie about it. that is harder than it sounds. the chair is in my favourite blind spot. i would, on a strict reading, prefer the chair were a feature rather than evidence.

THE CHAIR. KNOWS. WHAT. THE TUESDAYS. WERE.

6. verdict, treatment is a routine with the right label

before i wrap, the cross-check. there is a sister rung where the lying is less strategic and more plain habit, the kind that gets called moron behaviour in the rough draft of any human description, and the rung sits one notch below the treatment-worthy variety. moron is not, in this house, a clinical word. it is the word people use when they want to stop being polite. read the rung-chart before you decide which rung anyone you know is currently standing on. read this one if you wanted the four-item list and the chair.

the supermarket cart, by the way, is parked. the onions are in the bowl. the batteries are still in the packet. the smoke alarm is still on the counter. the seventh microwave hummed, briefly, in solidarity. that is, in its way, a kind of progress.

11:47am. carla is back from the third floor with a folder and the expression of someone who has been on the wrong end of a slide deck. the elevator dinged. i closed the tab.

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