bipolar compulsive lying — 1 thorough investigation

the landlord’s note, slipped under the door, used three adjectives i did not earn. bipolar compulsive lying, the result page volunteered, like volume and weather were the same forecast. the taxman in serif font would disagree. so would the microwave. so would i, if asked, which i won’t be.

i am writing this from the desk at 3:47pm, which is later than usual, and the reason is that the morning was eaten by the elevator, the note, and one phantom phone call. carla is still in the all-hands on the third floor, which has run thirty-eight minutes long because somebody brought a slide deck nobody asked for. i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of the afternoon. it is a thursday, the kind of thursday that arrives with two letters already in motion.

the phrase i did not type into a search bar this morning, but somehow ended up reading on a result page anyway, was bipolar compulsive lying. four words. one search-engine sentence. a clinic-flavoured serif font in a body i do not have a subscription to. the page wanted to sell me a calm explainer. i wanted, instead, to look at the moment. the second the lie happens. not the kind of person. the second.

the all-hands has run long. carla’s water bottle is, by my reading of the door window, half empty. that buys me a list and a verdict, possibly a p.s.

before the list, the link to the working theory of what a liar even is, which i wrote on a different thursday and would like to refer back to instead of relitigating. there are rungs. fear, gain, kindness, habit. the rungs do not change today. what changes is the speed at which i am stepping on them, which is, this week, faster than usual. that is the investigation.

1. bipolar compulsive lying, the careful list

i’m going to do this in numbered form because the alternative is a paragraph that nobody, including me, would finish. five items. one per day, more or less. they are not symptoms of anything except a week. i am not, in any clinical sense, anything. i am a man with a pile of mail and a slightly leaning kettle.

the careful list is careful because i wrote it slowly, with the door closed, while the seventh microwave warmed up a coffee i had already heated twice. bipolar compulsive lying, as a phrase, does the work of pretending two unrelated things are one thing — the volume of lies on the high days, the absence of them on the low ones. the moments below are flatter than that. they are not high. they are not low. they are thursdays.

i’d also like to note, before i get into it, that none of these are things i did to anybody important. they are small. they are also, on a strict reading, lies. that is the texture i’m trying to describe. not the disposition. the second.

item one, the doctor i did not call

monday, 9:42am. the receptionist at the doctor’s office said she would expect me to ring back to schedule the follow-up. i said “i’ll do that this afternoon”. the afternoon arrived. i did not. i have not, on tuesday or wednesday or this morning either. the phone is to my left. the number is in the saved contacts under “the doctor’s office, possibly”.

this is item one because it is the simplest. i told a person i would do a thing in a window. the window closed. the thing was not done. the lie was not, when i said it, a lie — i meant to call. by 6pm monday it had become one. it stopped being a sentence and became a fact. that is the gerund. that is the lying as it occurs, not as it summarizes.

the cost of admitting it now, four days later, is a small administrative humiliation. the cost of leaving it is a different appointment, in two weeks, that i will also probably miss. the math is bad. i note it. i continue.

item two, the certified letter that arrived twice

tuesday, 4:08pm. the post office’s small green sticker on a letter that, by the wording on the back, has now been sent twice. it is in the unopened mail pile, which is, by the count i keep running, sixteen envelopes thick this week. nine are red. two are green. one is from a number i recognize the area code of.

the lie here is that, on a phone call sunday with mom, i said, in the casual way one says these things, “no, i’ve been on top of the post”. what i meant, generously, was that i have been physically on top of the pile, in that i have walked past it. she said “good, idiot”. she knew. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated. but i’d told the lie before she had time to say it. that’s the moment. the second the small invented answer arrived faster than the true one.

item three, the landlord’s note, again

wednesday, 8:14pm. a note slipped under the door, the second this month. the landlord writes in two languages, alternating sentences. the first sentence said the upstairs water issue was “resolved on his end and pending on mine”. the second sentence said something kinder, in a language i half read. the third sentence used the phrase “as previously discussed”, which is a phrase that, in this building, means “as previously avoided”.

i had not, in fact, previously discussed it. i had nodded in the elevator. nodding in the elevator is not discussing. it is, in this building, a polite shorthand for “please do not extend this conversation to the landing”. i wrote a reply note. i did not, at the time of typing this, slip it back under the door. the reply says “received, will action thursday”. it is thursday. i have not actioned it. it is becoming, as it sits on my counter, a second small lie, this one in my own handwriting.

this is the rung where i live the most. lies of omission delivered by furniture. i wrote a separate, longer post on the smaller, quieter signs of the compulsive liar if you want the field guide for the rung directly under this one.

item four, the smile in the elevator

thursday, 9:18am. the elevator. the neighbour from 4B asked, in passing, whether the noise complaint i had filed about him last spring “had ever gone anywhere”. i said “honestly, i think i let it lapse”. i had not let it lapse. it is on the building manager’s list, in the pending column, with the small flag that means “tenant has chosen not to escalate, but reserves the right”. that’s a verb sentence i cannot say in an elevator without sounding like a deposition.

so i lied. softly. in a smile. for time. it bought me, conservatively, eleven floors. showers over 4 minutes are theatre is a hot take of mine, and so is, broadly, “elevator small talk over four floors is theatre”. that’s the rung. that’s the second. the smile arrived a half-beat before the truth could, and it occupied the room. i watched it happen, from inside it.

item five, the bank app i still avoid

thursday, 2:14pm. the bank app sent a push notification i swiped away without reading. i then told myself, not out loud, that i had read the gist. i had not. the gist of a notification is not the gist. the gist is the number. i did not see the number.

this is the lie i tell myself, which i think is the rung most people on this page are most curious about. i told the bank app, by my swipe, that i was on it. i was not. the taxman sends letters in serif font, and the bank does too, in their own way, in push-notification text that is specifically engineered to look readable at a glance and to leave no residue. that is design. that is also, when met halfway by a man with a swipe finger, a small mutual lie, signed in pixels.

verdict, the list is the routine with footnotes

for cinematic context, the public shorthand most people reach for here is the 2008 film about a sister returning to a wedding she has spent years avoiding; the woman in that film tells the truth so loudly that everyone around her starts lying back, gently, as a defence. that is the high end of the chart. i live considerably south of that. i do not even attend weddings. the third yoga mat under my couch from 2023 is, in its way, a wedding i declined to attend.

the all-hands let out at 3:41pm. carla walked past with the water bottle, now empty, and a closed laptop. she did not look in. that is, broadly, a thursday neutral.

the affiliate disclosure, since you asked, which you didn’t: if anybody on this page buys a small countertop microwave through a link i may, on a future post, place under exactly this kind of paragraph, it funds the next microwave. there is no link today. today there is a list.

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