bipolar pathological lying — 1 explainer, sort of

the apartment is the only room where every lie is mine alone. bipolar pathological lying, the page wants. the third yoga mat watches me from the corner. the receipt wallet bulges. all chairs are bar stools, including the one i am not sitting in. the how-to is a list of things i will not do, in order.

i am writing this from the desk on a friday at 11:34am, with carla in a vendor walkthrough on the third floor and a stretch of quiet that the calendar has labeled “open work block”. i did not label it. someone else labeled it. i am here, in the open work block, doing what the search bar told me to do, which is explain a topic i did not pick.

this is not a clinic. this is a hallway between meetings. i am not a doctor. a doctor is a person with a job. i am a person with a tab.

i would like to lower the volume on this one. the topic is not a punchline and i don’t intend to make it one. what i can do is explain how an ordinary person who is not a clinician thinks about a phrase he keeps seeing online, while standing barefoot on a kitchen tile that is colder than the kitchen. for the heavier word in the phrase, see the cluster pillar on the liar idea and what the internet means by it. that page is the long version. this one is the apartment version.

i looked up the second word. i did not look up the first. the first word is a clinical word and clinical words are not for me to host. so the page below explains the second one, leaning on the apartment, which is the only room i fully control.

1. bipolar pathological lying, the at-home steps

here is the page in one paragraph, because the at-home version of anything is always one paragraph if you are honest about it. step one, decline to medicalize a tuesday. step two, sit on the bar stool i now call a chair. step three, audit the receipts you carry. step four, observe the third yoga mat and decline to use it. step five, sleep on it, do not call the doctor. there. that is the explainer. the rest is decoration.

the page google built for this phrase wants a procedure. people want a procedure. i would also like a procedure. what i have instead is five small things i do in the kitchen when a phrase like this lands on the back of my eye, and a strong opinion that none of them are the same as a diagnosis.

i am writing this in the kitchen in the metaphorical sense. the desk is at work. the apartment is the room my brain returns to when it is asked to think about who i am. the apartment is where the third yoga mat lives. the apartment is where the receipt wallet lives. the apartment is where the kitchen tile is colder than the kitchen. those are the props of this explainer. those are the only things i feel qualified to point at.

2. step one, decline to medicalize the tuesday

most tuesdays are tuesdays. i had a tuesday last week where i told a small lie to a man at the post office about whether i had been there before. i had been there before. i lied because i did not want to be remembered. that is not a syndrome. that is a tuesday.

the temptation, when you read a long phrase like the one in the title of this post, is to take a small thing you did and pin it to a big word. i refuse. i did this once with a different word and it ate three weeks. i had to be talked out of it by mike at the bar, who said, with the certainty of a man who has not filed since 2019, “small things stay small if you keep your hands off them”. he was holding a beer. the beer agreed with him.

the at-home rule is: do not promote the tuesday. the tuesday does not need a promotion. the tuesday is fine where it is.

3. step two, sit on the bar stool i now call a chair

i have a chair in the kitchen that is not a chair. it is a bar stool i bought two apartments ago from a place that has since closed. it has the height of a bar stool and the seat of a stool and the back of nothing, because there is no back. i sit on it to write things i cannot type at the desk, and i sit on it to read mail i should not be reading, and i sit on it on fridays at 7:14am with coffee i did not really want.

which brings me to all chairs are bar stools, eventually. that is a hot take from the bank, and it is, in this case, also the literal truth of my apartment. the chair is a bar stool. the bar stool is a chair. the language did not catch up. the seat did not change.

step two is: when a phrase like the one in the title of this post lands, sit on the chair that admits what it is. you cannot read about heavy phrases on a soft couch. the couch will lie back, and you will lie back, and then you will believe whatever the page tells you. the bar stool keeps the spine straight. the spine, in turn, keeps the brain modest.

this is also where the homer-in-me wants to point at the chair and say “this is innovation”. it is not. it is a bar stool. innovation is not the word.

4. step three, audit the receipts you carry

i carry a receipt wallet. it is not a wallet. it is a receipt wallet. the difference is what it contains, which is receipts, mostly old, mostly faded, mostly for things i do not remember buying. i carry them because at some point i decided the receipts were proof, and proof was something i should be able to produce, and i have not yet been asked to produce them, but i remain ready.

step three: when a phrase like the one in the title of this post is sitting on your screen, sit on the bar stool and empty the receipt wallet. read each one. ask yourself, on each one, the question “did the version of me who bought this think he was lying about anything”. usually the answer is no. usually the answer is “the version of me who bought this thought he needed a small thermos”. that is not a syndrome. that is a small thermos.

the audit is the point. the receipts are not the point. the audit is a way of facing a small mountain of small honest decisions, each one made by a real person on a real tuesday, and noticing that the honest small decisions outnumber, by a lot, the dishonest ones. the receipt wallet is, in this sense, a defense witness. the receipt wallet is also bulging. the receipt wallet has been told to slim down. the receipt wallet does not listen.

5. step four, observe the third yoga mat, decline to use

the third yoga mat is in the corner of the apartment in the way a piece of evidence is in the corner of a courtroom. it is rolled. it has not been used in a long time. it is the third because there were two before it, and the two before it ended in ways i prefer not to revisit. it is in the kitchen as a quiet reminder that i, the person now writing this from a desk that is not in the kitchen, have a long history of buying ambition and storing it.

step four is: observe the mat. do not unroll it. do not perform an apology. do not promise it anything. observe.

the trick of a phrase like the one in the title of this post is that it asks you to perform something. it wants you to do a thing on camera. the at-home version is the opposite. the at-home version is to look at the third yoga mat, which is a softer monument to your own non-action, and to feel the small uneasy peace of not lying to it. the mat does not need a story. the mat is fine being a mat. you are fine being a person with a mat. step four ends here. step four is the easiest step. it has the lowest count of moving parts, which makes it, also, the most likely to work.

6. step five, sleep on it, do not call the doctor

the last step is the one that costs the most. step five is: do not call the doctor at 10:51am on a friday because of a phrase. the doctor is a real person with a real day. the phrase is not a real thing happening to you in real time. the phrase is a tab. the tab can wait until monday. you can wait until monday.

this is not anti-doctor. doctors are a person with a job, and i respect a person with a job. this is anti-impulse. the impulse to read a long phrase and convert it into a phone call is the same impulse that puts a fork in a microwave, except the fork in the microwave is, at least, your fork. the doctor is not your fork. the doctor is somebody else’s job.

sleep on it. sleep on it in the kitchen with the bar stool and the third yoga mat and the receipt wallet that is too full. sleep on it in a way that is not “i will pretend this never happened”. sleep on it in the way of “i will let the next morning weigh in, because the next morning has a vote, and the next morning is rarely as urgent as the night before”. the next morning is, for me, a friday at 10:51am. that is when i write this kind of thing. the timing is not a coincidence. the timing is a method.

7. verdict, the steps are short, on purpose

the steps are short, on purpose. they are short because long steps require expertise, and i don’t have any. they are short because long steps invite obedience, and a person obeying steps from a stranger on the internet is exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be obeying steps from a stranger on the internet. they are short because the apartment is small. they are short because the bar stool is small. they are short because the third yoga mat, rolled, is small.

i would like the page to leave you with less than you came for. that is the honest end of an at-home explainer. the long version of who lies and why and how the internet keeps re-shelving the question — that lives at the cluster pillar and at the page about the longer version of the second word, which i wrote earlier and which is calmer than this one. i’d point you at the third one too, but i don’t want to push.

if the only thing this page does is convince you to sit on a bar stool for ten minutes before you click anything else, i would call that the day’s main accomplishment. carla’s vendor walkthrough is wrapping up. i can hear the third floor through the building’s bones. the open work block is going to close on its own, the way they all do. the receipt wallet is still bulging. the third yoga mat is still rolled. the apartment is still mine, including, by the rule of the page, every lie inside it.