chronic liar — 1 explainer, sort of
chronic liar — 1 explainer, sort of
the wedding venue still smelled like other people’s vows when i arrived. tom was not there. tom is never there, in the fancy way of being absent. chronic liar, the working list said, is a phrase used by people who lost an argument and would like a stronger word for it. the landlord caught me by the buffet and asked, quietly, whether the rent had cleared. somewhere, off in another postcode, the man_who_calls was, statistically, dialling.
at the desk now. wednesday, 9:33am. carla took two folders into the q3 pre-read upstairs, which i interpret as one folder per opinion she plans to have. the rest of the morning is, generously, mine. the airpod, the surviving one, is in.
so. chronic liar. the word “chronic” does most of the load-bearing here. it does not mean the lies are big. it does not mean the lies are theatrical. it means they are frequent, in the way a cough is frequent — the body learned the shape, and the shape comes out before the brain has been consulted. that is the thing i want to investigate, plainly, while the meeting upstairs runs long.
this is what makes the rung worth a separate post. the strategic liar lies for a reason and can name it. the chronic version sits flatter, quieter, and that is, i submit, where most working adults actually live. for the deeper rung-chart of the whole field, see the working theory of liar i set up earlier in the year, which is the pillar this post is bolted to.
CHRONIC. IS. A. HABIT. THE. BODY. LEARNED.
1. chronic liar, the working list
i thought about this at the wedding venue. there was a buffet, a string quartet doing something polite, and the landlord, who had somehow been invited, gently asking whether the april payment was in the account she could see. i told her, in honesty, “it should clear by monday”. this is not, on a strict reading, a lie. it is a forecast. forecasts are the cheapest housing the chronic liar pays rent on.
here is the working list i scribbled on a napkin and later transferred to the running notes. signs of a chronic liar, partly research, partly audit:
- the answers always have a soft hedge — “i think”, “broadly”, “should”, “more or less”, “i’d say”.
- the apologies, when they come, are about timing rather than substance — “sorry that took a minute”, not “sorry i did not do it”.
- the calendar is consulted, ostentatiously, in front of the asker, as if scheduling were a kind of evidence.
- the bank app is open in another tab and never refreshed.
- the voicemail, off-screen, is full. it has been full long enough that the fullness is the actual policy.
five items is a list. seven would be a personality. i kept it at five because i recognised the fourth and the fifth in myself and decided, around item six, to stop looking.
2. the small lies, ranked
the small lies are the rung where the chronic liar lives. polite, low-stakes, high-frequency. “i’m doing fine.” “i ate.” “i’ll get to it after this.” “i’m two minutes away.” each one is, on a strict reading, a small invented answer. on a friday reading, social grease. the chronic liar tells dozens of them a week without flinching, because the body stores them in the same warehouse as “good morning” and “no, you go ahead”.
i told mike, last week at the bar, that i was “thinking about” filing my taxes. i was not. i was thinking about a potato. mike, who has not filed since 2019, nodded with the diplomatic patience of a man whose own ledger is similarly out of date. signs of a chronic liar, i have come to think, include the willingness of the people around you to nod without inspecting.
3. the medium lies, briefly
the medium lies take a small amount of construction. a sentence and a half. “i sent the email this morning, the server is just slow.” “the cheque is on the way, the post here is unreliable.” “i meant to call, but my phone died.” the medium lie requires the chronic liar to remember a small fictional infrastructure — a server, a postal route, a battery — and keep it consistent for the conversation.
on a sunday call with mom i once told her, plainly, that i had “rearranged a meeting” to call her on time. there was no meeting. the chronic liar in me reached for a small administrative fiction because the true sentence — “i set an alarm” — felt too thin to mention. she said “that’s good” in the tone she uses when she knows. mothers know.
4. the large lies, by omission
the large lies are almost always lies of omission. the chronic liar does not invent giant counterfeit autobiographies — that is the rung above. the chronic liar simply does not say the load-bearing sentence, and lets the listener fill the gap with whatever assumption is most flattering.
“are your affairs in order?” — the honest answer is “broadly, no, there is a leaning tower of unopened mail by the door, seven envelopes are red, two are certified, and i have not opened the bank app since approximately march”. the chronic answer is “i have a system”. the word “system” is doing the load-bearing work of a small european bridge. that is the omission. the body has learned the shape so well it comes out before the brain.
let me put this plainly. the chronic liar is a person who did not choose to deceive but allowed a small grammar of avoidance to ossify. the choice was made years ago, in a kitchen, on a phone call, when the truth was inconvenient and the small redirection was easier. the redirection got rehearsed. the rehearsal became muscle. the muscle contracts on its own.
this is not a defence. this is a description. there is, i’m fairly sure, a study somewhere — possibly in a serious magazine — about how habit-lying speeds up over time until the lie arrives faster than the truth would. i can’t find it. but it scans on a wednesday.
i rest my case. partially. the rest is in the running notes.
5. the landlord caught one, predictably
the landlord caught a chronic answer at the wedding venue, which is a place i already wish i had not been. she had asked about the rent, plainly. i had said “it should clear by monday”. she said, equally plainly, “you said monday two mondays ago”. this is the moment the chronic liar dreads — not the confrontation, but the light receipt-presentation, the small unornamented evidence of a phrase being repeated in the same key for too long.
she did not press. she did not have to. the receipt was the press. landlords are some of the best detectives in the housing economy because they do not have to prove anything in court — they only have to keep their books, and the books, eventually, prove it themselves. she went back to the buffet. i went back to my plate. the receipt was the meal.
6. the wedding venue silence i still owe
the larger omission of the day is that my husband is a chronic liar and dealing with a chronic liar are two of the most-typed phrases on the search page that pointed someone here, and i am not going to pretend i am qualified to answer either. i live alone. the only chronic liar i can audit, plainly, is the one writing this paragraph from a desk in a building tom does not work in.
but i can offer the wedding venue silence as the closest equivalent i have. tom got married — a few years back, on a clear afternoon, in a venue with a string quartet and a buffet i ate twice from. i was there alone. i never wrote tom a note about it. i meant to. i did not. the chronic shape of the omission: i told mike i had written it, told mom i had sent it, told myself, on a sunday, that i would draft it that afternoon. i did not. that is a multi-year chronic lie, told quietly, to multiple parties, including myself. the 2002 dreamworks film about a teenage forger who flew airplanes he did not own is a different rung — performance lying for the romance of it. mine is just inertia in a tie.
7. verdict — chronic is a kind of consistency
chronic liar is, in its way, a kind of consistency. not a virtue. but a shape. the chronic liar does not lie because they have a target. they lie because the small redirection, repeated for years, has become the path of least resistance. the body learned it. the room rewarded it. the people around the chronic liar learned, in turn, not to inspect.
mountain people, i have come to believe, are wrong about most things, except the recognition that altitude makes weather honest. at the wedding venue, at sea level, surrounded by a string quartet and a buffet, dishonesty is the air. mountain people would not have rsvp’d at all. they would have stayed on the mountain, eaten cheese, declined the silence. i admire that. i do not currently practise it.
the soft, reflex-version of this same shape is mapped in my working definition of the compulsive liar, which is the rung directly adjacent and where, on a strict reading, i sometimes guest-lecture.
so the verdict: i am, by my own audit, a chronic liar of the omission rung — three or four small redirections a day, sustained for years, mostly about money, sleep, and whether i ate. i am not climbing the chart. i am not descending it either. that is the consistency.
budget pre-meeting let out. carla walked past the desk with both folders and a sandwich. the sandwich is a sign of the meeting having gone well, or of carla having been hungry. either reading is consistent with the kind of investigation this is.
the airpod, in my left ear, has approximately an hour left. the seventh microwave is currently silent, which is the only setting it has been reliable on. the third yoga mat lives under the couch and has lived there since 2023, possibly evolving — that, by the way, is a chronic omission with an object attached. the unknown number dialled twice this morning — once at 8:11am, once at 9:32am. the man_who_calls is, somewhere, working through his own list.
the working list of seven sat on the desk through three drafts. five items survived. two were retired for being too close to a confession.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
leading expert, the buffet-receipt school of self-audit
p.s. the wedding silence, for the avoidance of doubt, is now in its third year. i am not counting it. the napkin, however, is.
