compulsive liar symptoms — 1 thorough investigation

tom’s name appeared in a message that wasn’t for me. the page underneath it listed compulsive liar symptoms like a grocery receipt, item by item, and i recognised about half of them as small things i do before noon. the receipt wallet was sitting next to the keyboard, three ply thick, behaving like a paid witness. tom owns a house. i rent. tom files taxes in march. i file them, broadly, when somebody insists. the message was probably about a different tom. probably.

at the desk, 10:21am on a thursday. carla is on the third floor, training session about something with a long name. door was already closed when i walked past. i have, by the rough math, the rest of the morning before anyone notices the cursor isn’t moving on my screen.

so. compulsive liar symptoms. the phrase is the kind of phrase you only run into because somebody forwarded a chain text to the wrong number, which is, in fairness, also a small lie of attention. i clicked the link. i read the list. i closed the tab. i opened it again. so this is the investigation. the broader investigation into the working theory of liar already sits at the desk in another file; this one is the smaller, quieter cousin that asks whether the symptoms are mine, or just wednesday’s.

compulsive liar symptoms are the small involuntary tells of a person who lies without obvious gain: borrowed stories told as their own, frictionless contradictions across the same week, granular detail nobody asked for, a shrugging absence of paper trail, and a quiet preference for whichever version of events flatters the current room.

SYMPTOMS. ARE. NOT. CRIMES. THEY. ARE. TUESDAYS.

i need that on the wall before we go further. the symptom list, on most pages, reads like a verdict. read closely, it reads like a description of a man with a phone and some unopened mail. tom would have noticed by symptom three. i’m somewhere around symptom two and a half, and i would like to be very specific about which half.

compulsive liar symptoms, my list, watered down by a man at a desk

the page i landed on listed nine symptoms. i am, for editorial reasons, going to give you the same nine, in my own words, with annotations from the inside. the inside, in this case, is a desk on the third floor with the door open and a receipt wallet that disagrees with several things i have said this week.

1. borrowing other people’s stories. the compulsive liar tells your story back to you, slightly improved, as if it happened to them. i have, on a good week, done this once. on a bad week, twice. i caught myself last month repeating mike’s bar anecdote about a tax officer to a colleague in the kitchen, and the colleague was nodding along, and i didn’t stop.
2. frictionless contradiction. the compulsive liar will say two things on the same wednesday that cannot both be true, and feel no friction. i have done this. mostly with the question “did you eat”. i will say yes at noon and no at one and mean both, sincerely, in different rooms.
3. specific detail nobody asked for. a compulsive liar offers granular detail to make a vague claim sound load-bearing. “i was at the place on the corner, the one with the green awning, around quarter past.” nobody asked about the awning. the awning is the tell.
4. no paper trail. the compulsive liar’s life is, by design, undocumented even to themselves. the receipts are gone. the calendar is empty. the receipt wallet, on the rare occasion it exists, is decorative. i have a receipt wallet. it is, as we speak, three ply thick. that is, i suspect, three ply more than the symptom expects.
5. preferred version of events. the compulsive liar gravitates to whichever version of last week makes the current room more comfortable. i do this constantly. on sunday calls i did fine. at the desk i did adequately. at the bar i did poorly. all true. all selected.
6. denial without ceremony. a compulsive liar denies things flatly, without the small frown of a person who is actually offended.
7. casual erasure. small earlier admissions stop existing. you said it monday. by thursday it never happened. the thursday version is the version.
8. fluency under pressure. when caught, the compulsive liar becomes more articulate, not less. the prose tightens. the sentences shorten. the punctuation improves. this paragraph, you may have noticed, is doing it.
9. no obvious gain. the lie pays nothing. it just lies. that is the whole symptom. and it is the one that, on this list, separates compulsive from the more transactional kind of habitual liar who at least lies for something.

nine symptoms. by my honest morning count, i recognise about three and a half. half is wednesday. one of them is the receipt wallet, which is, i would like to argue, exonerating evidence. the rest is on the page.

the receipt wallet that contradicts me, three ply thick

this is where it gets uncomfortable for the symptom list. the receipt wallet is a small leather thing, three pockets deep, that lives in the top drawer of this desk. it has, in it, every receipt i have collected since approximately march. nobody asked me to keep them. nobody is going to audit me. but the wallet exists, and the wallet is full, and the wallet, on a strict reading of symptom four, contradicts the diagnosis.

a compulsive liar does not keep receipts. a compulsive liar misplaces them at the till. a compulsive liar is, on the paperwork side, vapour. i am not vapour. i am, on the paperwork side, a man with a wallet that will, eventually, need a second wallet. the first wallet is currently doing the work of three. the third pocket has receipts from a coffee place that, i have just realised, closed in october.

so. either the receipt wallet means i am not, technically, on this rung. or the receipt wallet is itself a compulsive lie, told quietly to my own filing system, about how organised i am. i have, for the last six paragraphs, been pretending the first reading is the obvious one. the second reading is also available. the receipt wallet does not, on its own, settle the question. nothing on a wednesday does.

tom would have noticed by symptom three

tom is the test case here. tom from university, who now owns a small house with a long driveway, two children, a wife who balances a budget, and a volvo that adjusts to suit his lower back. tom files taxes in march. tom keeps insurance documents in a labelled folder. tom can tell you, on demand, which week of which month he last saw his accountant. tom is, in the paperwork sense, a man whose life is documented to the third decimal.

tom would have read the symptom list at coffee, on a saturday, between innings of his son’s tee-ball game, and shrugged, and forgotten it by lunch. nothing on the list would have rhymed with anything in his life. tom does not borrow stories. tom does not contradict himself across rooms. tom does not have a receipt wallet pretending to be a system.

this is the part where, on most blogs, somebody would tell you that tom is, secretly, the bigger liar, because the appearance of order is the deeper deception. i am not going to do that. tom is not the bigger liar. tom is, by every available measure, the smaller liar, and the suggestion that he is secretly worse is itself a small symptom of a man at a desk doing the borrowing-and-improving move from item one of the list.

i contrast tom with myself because the contrast is honest. tom owns. i rent. tom files. i avoid. tom’s life is documented; mine is, by symptom four, not. that is not a verdict on either of us. we are both, on the bigger chart, valid. mine has more naps. it also, on the symptom list, has more items checked. i would like that in honesty. for cinematic context here, the public shorthand most people use for the high end of this rung is the long con depicted in the 2013 picture about a federal sting and bad hairpieces, namely the david o. russell film about a pair of con artists pulled into an FBI operation; that is the cinema end. i live closer to the kitchen end of the same building.

the small habits that look like a pattern

here is where the symptom list does, in fairness, work. one symptom is a friday. three symptoms in a quiet week is a working hypothesis. seven symptoms, repeating themselves on cue, is a pattern. patterns, unlike single events, are visible from the desk to the kitchen and back.

my own audit, drafted between paragraphs, runs roughly: borrowing — sometimes; frictionless contradiction — occasionally, mostly about food; specific detail nobody asked for — chronic, especially about commute times; no paper trail — see receipt wallet, contested; preferred version — constant, a personality trait; denial without ceremony — rare, i still frown; casual erasure — only with regard to a yoga mat, my third, which has been “in active use” for two years; fluency under pressure — yes, hello; no obvious gain — only the small ones.

that is, on my own scoring, four to five out of nine, with two contested. on the strict reading of the page i first landed on, that is a working pattern. on the loose reading, it is a wednesday with stationery. i am, predictably, voting for the loose reading.

worth noting: the page itself is the kind of page that monetises certainty. somewhere on it there will have been a button. the button will have invited you to take a quiz. the quiz will have told you, in eight cheerful screens, that you are or are not a compulsive liar. i did not click the button. one symptom of any list is the desire for the list to confirm what you already suspected. i suspected i was fine. i suspected this would prove it. that, on the symptom chart, is symptom five, dressed in a different jacket.

the silent plant that watches all of this, technically a landlord

brenda the dead plant is on the corner of the desk. brenda has been on the corner of the desk since approximately spring. brenda is, technically, deceased. nobody has confirmed this in writing. the plant does not speak. the plant does not file reports. the plant occupies a square of desk that, by the lease, i pay for monthly.

plants are silent landlords. i think about that line a lot. brenda is, in the strict economic sense, my smallest landlord. she takes up a square of paid square footage and produces, in return, nothing — no oxygen, no greenery, no decorative confirmation that i am a person who can keep a thing alive. she is, on the symptom list, a paper trail of one. she is the one piece of this desk that contradicts every claim i make about being on top of things.

i have not thrown brenda out. throwing brenda out would be admitting brenda is dead, which would be admitting the apartment is not, currently, the home of a man with control over his own ecosystem. brenda is, in this sense, my largest single piece of evidence on the symptom list, sitting twelve inches from my keyboard, in plain view, watering itself off the budget i am not running. she is, also, the only thing on this desk that has been honest with me all year. the dead plant has not lied once.

tom, by the way, has a fern in his kitchen that is, by his own report, “thriving”. i have not asked for proof. i don’t need it. tom has receipts. the fern is on the receipts.

verdict, my symptoms are mostly thursday

so here we are. ten in the morning. training session still going on the third floor. the receipt wallet to my left, brenda the silent landlord to my right, and an honest answer to the question “do i have compulsive liar symptoms” sitting on the desk between us.

the honest answer is: a few. four, by my morning count. five if you score the dormant yoga mat strictly. seven if you score generously. zero if you score the wallet as exonerating evidence and grade the rest on a curve. the question, then, is not whether the symptoms are present — they are, in any honest household, present in some quantity — but whether they constitute a pattern severe enough to earn the noun. mine, broadly, do not. they are, broadly, monday.

tom would not score on this list at all. tom is, in this sense, the control group. i am the experimental group, drafted at this desk over several thursdays, with a wallet, a plant, and a phone i sometimes do not pick up. the symptoms are, in my case, the texture of a life held together with small discretions. they are not, by the strict definition, the lies of a man who lies for the texture of lying.

which brings me, briefly, to the one thing the symptom list got right, and i would like to credit it for: the line about no obvious gain. that is the line that separates the rung. when i lie, i can tell you why. fear, gain, kindness, habit. when the compulsive liar lies, there is no why. the lie just is. that is the load-bearing distinction. and i am, on that distinction, on a slightly different rung, which is the rung labelled “wednesday with stationery”, which is, in fairness, also on the chart.

if you scored the same as me on the audit, congratulations, welcome to the desk. there is a chair. it adjusts in zero ways. brenda will not greet you. the wallet, however, will.

training session let out at 10:43. carla walked past with a different folder. she did not look in. that is, broadly, a monday good sign. or a tuesday bad sign. impossible to score from this side of the door.