compulsive liar syndrome — 1 thorough investigation

the drawer of certified letters is full enough to qualify as furniture. compulsive liar syndrome, the article hinted, is hereditary. tom did not lie like this. tom lied with eye contact and full sentences. one cupholder. one syndrome, if we are calling it that. i am not calling it that. i am opening the drawer.

at the desk. tuesday, mid-morning. carla is upstairs at a quarterly handover on the third floor with her good pen, which means she expects to be writing on behalf of someone, probably the boss, probably for an hour. i have, conservatively, the rest of the morning before any of this is mine to manage.

so. compulsive liar syndrome. i have been turning the phrase in my head since the article. it has, when you tap it, a different sound to its siblings. disease is a hospital word. illness is a bathrobe word. syndrome is, in the family of borrowed nouns, the one with the small clipboard. it implies, in a way the others don’t, that several behaviours have been observed together, often enough, to be packaged. that is a more ambitious claim. that is a kit, not a flu.

that’s the move i would like, in this post, to slow down and look at. syndrome, more than its siblings, hides a small piece of mathematical work. it implies that several habits travel together, that they share a hidden cause, and that, by naming the cluster, you have done the most useful part of the work. i have, in my own apartment, an unopened mail pile that would, on the same logic, qualify as postal avoidance syndrome. you can hear, when i say it out loud, that the noun is doing the work the behaviour was supposed to do.

this post sits at the centre of my working theory of liar-adjacent words — the rung-chart i keep updating in my head, drafted at this same desk on a different week. syndrome is, on that chart, the version of the noun that comes with the most furniture. it is the most expensive rental in the borrowed-word aisle.

compulsive liar syndrome, the working sketch

let me sketch what people seem to mean when they reach for the phrase. they mean, broadly, a person who lies often, lies smoothly, lies under little pressure, and continues lying after being caught. they mean a person whose lying does not always pay, does not always make sense, and does not always stop when calling it out. they mean — and this is the part the noun is hiding — a person who has assembled three or four separate habits over years, each of which has a reason, into a routine that, from outside, looks like one thing.

that’s the trick. from outside, a routine looks like a syndrome. from inside, a routine looks like a tuesday, then a wednesday, then a thursday, with one or two of the habits doing more work than the others. the noun bundles. the inside, broadly, is unbundled. you cannot diagnose a syndrome from inside the syndrome. you can only, on a friday, notice you are tired.

i would also like to flag, while we are sketching, that the phrase compulsive liar syndrome does not appear in any working clinical document i can locate. compulsive lying, on its own, is sometimes discussed in the manuals they reference on the shows i watch, but mostly as a feature of other things, not as a syndrome of its own. the phrase, in other words, is a search-bar invention. it has the shape of a diagnosis. it does not have the substance of one. for cleaner, less branded ground on the same rung, see my longer sketch of what compulsive lying actually is, when you take the noun off it.

A. KIT. IS. NOT. A. CAUSE.

tom does not have a syndrome, tom has a calendar

this is where tom walks into the post, mostly because tom has, in his quiet way, been making this argument at me for a decade. tom — university friend, owner of a house, owner of a wife, owner of two children, owner of a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways i have never personally needed — does not, as a rule, like the word syndrome. tom prefers the word calendar. it’s a strange substitution. it took me a long time to understand it.

tom’s argument, draft after draft, is that most behaviours people call syndromes are, in fact, calendars. you have a habit on a tuesday. you have a different habit on a wednesday. on a thursday you have a third. by friday you have a routine. on a sunday, in a quiet hour, you may notice the routine. you may, in that quiet hour, give the routine a noun. the noun is the syndrome. the calendar is what’s actually there.

i remember a porch conversation with tom in 2021, in which he said, with the cool fluency of a man on his second beer of the evening, that anyone calling a behaviour a syndrome was usually trying to skip the calendar. “the calendar is the boring bit,” he said. “the noun is the interesting bit. people pay for the interesting bit.” tom did not lie like the man in this post lies. tom lied, when he lied, in eye contact, in full sentences, with the dates lined up. tom lied like a man who had, in fact, looked at the calendar.

tom would, for the record, not call any of this a syndrome. tom would call it three habits in a trench coat. tom is, in his way, a working epidemiologist of borrowed nouns. tom would also, in this post, want it noted that cars should have one cupholder; six is greed; the cupholder count, on tom’s volvo, is, by his own embarrassed admission, fourteen, and tom uses two of them. that is, on the rung-chart of cars, a fourteen-cupholder calendar pretending to be a one-cupholder syndrome. tom and i have not, on this point, fully reconciled.

the drawer of certified letters, my exhibit

i would like, in fairness, to walk through my own exhibit, which is the closest thing in this apartment to a “syndrome” — that is, a cluster of behaviours that, from outside, would look like a packaged kit. it lives in the kitchen. it is the drawer.

the drawer was not, originally, the drawer. it was, in 2021, when i moved in, a regular drawer, intended for tea towels, possibly utensils. somewhere in 2022 it absorbed its first certified letter. that letter sat in the drawer for, conservatively, ninety days. nothing happened. the absence of consequence was, in retrospect, the founding event. the drawer, having absorbed one letter without incident, was now a place a letter could go.

in 2023, the drawer absorbed three more. in 2024, seven. by the autumn of last year, the drawer was, by my own count, fourteen letters thick, plus a small sediment of bank statements, two utility re-issues, and one document with a dark seal on the front i have not yet examined. the drawer, in other words, has stopped being a drawer. it is now an exhibit.

here is the part that matters for this post. the behaviour that fills the drawer is not one behaviour. it is at least four. (1) i do not open mail i don’t recognise. (2) i do not open mail in unfamiliar envelopes. (3) i do not open mail with serif fonts on the address line. (4) i do not, in particular, open mail with a barcode and a printed sticker, because the sticker means the post office watched it arrive and is therefore a witness. those are four habits. each of them has a reason. each of the reasons, when said out loud at a desk on a tuesday morning, sounds slightly thin. but they are still four habits, not one.

if i wanted, i could call the drawer certified letter avoidance syndrome. it has the shape. four behaviours, one location, sustained over years, mildly distressing to the avoider, broadly puzzling to anyone who opens a kitchen drawer expecting tea towels. the noun would, in that moment, do the same work compulsive liar syndrome is doing for the person who typed it into a search bar. it would package four habits as one thing, and then, with the package neatly tied, i would not have to address any of the four. the noun would do the addressing on my behalf, by being a noun.

a brief note, between exhibits. the unopened mail pile by the door, separate from the drawer, has, this morning, gained one envelope and lost none. it is, by my count, eighteen envelopes thick. seven red. of the seven, three are now certified, which means three new candidates for the drawer, pending courage.

why “syndrome” adds nothing my mail pile didn’t say

here is, broadly, the structural problem with syndrome. the noun is supposed to do explanatory work. it implies that several behaviours share a cause and therefore can be addressed at the cause. but the cause, in the cases people actually type into search bars, is rarely available. the noun, in those cases, is doing decorative work pretending to be explanatory work.

my drawer of certified letters, as a sketched syndrome, would imply a single cause. but if i sit at this desk and audit honestly, the four behaviours do not share a cause. the first one is about paperwork energy. the second is about a private, unwritten policy on stationery. the third is about a fight i had with a phone bill in 2019 that has since become, in my head, a small religion. the fourth is about a particular postman who once knocked on a sunday. four causes. four budgets. one drawer. the drawer is the location, not the syndrome. the noun “syndrome” was the receipt for an explanation that did not occur.

compulsive liar syndrome, in my read, works the same way. the person typing the phrase into a search bar has, almost certainly, observed several behaviours in another person — frequency, embellishment, defensiveness, refusal to stop after being caught — and they are looking for a noun that says all four are one thing. the noun obliges. the noun packages. but the four behaviours, in the liar, almost certainly have four different reasons that have, over years, ended up sharing a kitchen.

this is, incidentally, the same move that gives us a phrase like gaslighting and other things my ex insists never happened. one borrowed noun, one packaged routine, several private reasons hiding underneath. i’m not, in this post, against gaslighting as a noun — it has, on certain days, earned itself. but the move is the move. one word does the bundling and then disappears, leaving the bundle.

when the word is helpful and when it is theatre

i would like, in fairness, to grant syndrome the limited fair use it has earned. there are clusters of behaviour, observed together in many people across decades, where the noun is doing real work. it points to a coherent picture. it gets a person into a room with somebody trained to look at the picture. that is the right room. it is not this desk. it is not, broadly, any kitchen drawer. a working syndrome takes a doctor to recognise and a manual to describe, and i, on a tuesday morning, am neither.

but the search term compulsive liar syndrome, in my read, is mostly typed by people who are not heading to that room. it is typed by partners, friends, colleagues, and occasionally the liar, sitting on a sofa or at a desk, looking for a noun that lets a difficult conversation feel addressed without having had it. the noun, in that use, is theatre. it is also, in fairness, a kind of self-care for the person typing — i recognise the gesture; i have made it about my own drawer; i am not above the move. but i would like, on the record, the difference noted.

here is, broadly, the test. if calling the cluster a syndrome gets you into a room with a professional, the noun has earned itself. if calling the cluster a syndrome lets you keep the partner, the friend, or the colleague exactly where they are, with no further conversation, for another six weeks — the noun has, in that use, cost more than it produced. and most of us, in my unscientific reckoning, are paying the second rent.

the cleanest portrait i have seen of a man who has assembled, by stages, what an outside observer might call a compulsive liar syndrome — but which the man himself would describe, accurately, as a calendar of small comfortable lies — is the daniel plainview character in there will be blood. the lying, in that picture, is not one thing. it is a long series of small calendar entries, repeated under pressure, until the calendar becomes a mythology. nobody, in the script, calls it a syndrome. they would have been wrong to.

verdict, my syndrome is a name for the avoidance

so here is the verdict, drawn at this desk, with the quarterly handover still going on the third floor, the drawer of certified letters humming gently in the kitchen at the volume of a dishwasher i don’t trust, and the unopened mail pile by the door now eighteen envelopes thick and counting. compulsive liar syndrome, as a phrase, is a packaging noun. it bundles four habits into one word and lets the word do the explaining. it is, in nearly all the uses i have seen typed into a search bar, a name for the avoidance, not a description of the cause.

i am, on a strict reading, not a compulsive liar. i am, on a strict reading, an economical liar with a thick drawer and a leaning pile. my lies are habits with reasons. tom would call them a calendar. tom would, on this point, be right. the drawer is, in tom’s frame, four habits sharing a kitchen, not one syndrome occupying a kitchen drawer. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. not opening the certified letters is, technically, a small lie i tell myself about the state of my affairs. it is not, however, a syndrome. it is a tuesday.

if you came here for a clinical noun that would let a difficult conversation be a packaged kit, i’m sorry. the noun isn’t going to do that work for you. the conversation is the conversation. the calendar is the calendar. the drawer is the drawer. you can give all three of those a single name, but the name will not, on a friday, open any of them.

handover let out. carla is back, the good pen is back in the holder, and there is a small pastry on her desk that did not, by any official channel, exist forty minutes ago. i interpret this as carla having been the most useful person in the room, which she usually is. the unopened mail pile, since the start of this post, has gained nothing further. the drawer of certified letters, by my last opening of the kitchen door, has gained one. that’s progress, in the negative direction.

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