compulsive liar therapy — 1 session i declined this morning

the receipt wallet has fattened to the size of a small dictionary. compulsive liar therapy, the page suggested, begins with a phone call to a professional. dave called. carla texted. neither was the professional. books on tape are cheating, i muttered, and put the wallet back. that was, technically, my session.

drafted at the desk on a wednesday at 11:34am, between a sprint planning two doors down i was, for once, not invited to and a slack thread called “owners?” that nobody is willing to volunteer for. carla is on the second floor, taking notes for someone else’s vendor walkthrough, with a cardigan she only wears on days the AC overcorrects. the seventh microwave is humming in the breakroom one floor down. it is not mine. i can hear it anyway.

so. compulsive liar therapy. i typed it into the search bar at 10:18am after the autocomplete read three of my words and tried to finish the sentence for me. the cluster’s working pillar on the noun liar with the rungs i keep returning to already laid out the heavy and the small ends. this post is what happens when you take the small end, attach the word therapy to it, and discover the result is a wednesday at a desk that, by lunch, will have produced one fewer answer than it started with.

compulsive liar therapy describes structured help — talk therapy, accountability scaffolding, occasionally CBT — used to interrupt the habit of small, repeated, automatic untruths. in practice it requires a person who books appointments, returns calls, and sits through the long pause where the answer was supposed to live. that prerequisite is, for some of us, the whole problem stated quietly.

THERAPY. IMPLIES. A. CALENDAR. I. DO. NOT. KEEP.

that line goes on the inside of a microwave door, if microwave doors at home still functioned as bulletin boards. the seventh microwave’s door has not closed properly since february, and the magnet keeps slipping off the handle. the index card with the line on it lives, as a result, on the wood next to the receipt wallet, where everything important ends up by accident.

compulsive liar therapy, the version i declined

here is the version i declined this morning, drafted at 11:08 with a coffee that was already cooler than i wanted. compulsive liar therapy, in the form i would tape to the side of the wallet if the wallet had walls, is four moving parts in a coat. one, a clinician with patience for the long silence after a question. two, a calendar that does not, by friday, eat itself. three, a patient who can describe the small lie without immediately telling another small lie to soften it. four, the willingness to lose the warm reward the lie was, in secret, providing.

that fourth part is, by my honest reading, where the literature i pretended to skim gets quiet. the warm reward — the small static of having gotten away with it — is the engine. the rest is upholstery. on the wood in front of me there is a receipt wallet, three index cards, a takeaway menu i never ordered from, and a single hot take written in a pen that is dying. the cluster’s working bullets on what defining compulsive lying actually involves at the kitchen-counter level covers the small end of the noun. therapy, which is the second word, is the appeal i have not yet filed.

dave called, carla walked past, neither knew

dave called at 9:47am. dave calls in pairs — a first ring he does not expect me to answer, and a second ring three minutes later that says, in the cadence of the silence after the third tone, “what did you do.” i did not pick up either time. dave still expects, on some level, the $300. he will not bring it up. he will, instead, tell me a story about his neighbour and a leaf blower, and the $300 will sit in the gap between his sentences like a furniture item nobody chose.

carla walked past my desk on her way to the elevator with a folder pressed against her chest the way you press a folder when the folder is not, strictly, the reason you are walking through. she did not stop. she said “hot one” about the AC, which is her wednesday opener, and kept moving. neither of them, in any operational sense, knew that the search bar at 10:18am had asked me to consider a profession.

that is rung one. the small lie is the one i tell the search bar when i type a phrase and immediately close the tab. the cluster’s long working note on the pathological liar definition i drafted on a different day at this same desk handles the heavier end, which is not what we are talking about here. compulsive is the small, repeated, automatic version. compulsive is what i did to the search bar at 10:18am when i clicked away.

the receipt for the session i did not book

the receipt wallet has, by my last count this morning, eight months of small paper. coffee, mostly. one dry cleaner from a coat i no longer own. two pharmacy slips. four parking validations for a garage i now avoid because the gate stopped recognising my plate. there is no receipt for therapy. there is no receipt because there was no transaction.

i thumb the wallet at the desk like a man counting change. the act of thumbing is, in my household, what therapy looks like — the body doing the small ritual the calendar refused. eight months of paper, sorted nowhere, kept anyway. the receipt for the session is the receipt that does not exist. that is the post in one paragraph. the cluster handles the working noun definitions on a longer note on the pathological lying definition i return to whenever the receipt wallet gets thumbed; this post handles the appointment that the noun, in its small form, would have required.

why “therapy” implies a goal i still do not have

therapy is a real and specific intervention with a real success rate. people, real ones, work through compulsive lying with a clinician over months, sometimes years, with measurable outcomes. there is a 2009 ricky gervais film, the invention of lying, where a man in a world of compulsory truth invents the first untruth and rides it into a small fortune, that frames the cure as a thing the world begins without and survives by accidentally inventing. real therapy is not that. real therapy is a wednesday that arrives every week for forty wednesdays and slowly does its job.

the trouble, for a person at the rung i seem to be on, is that therapy requires a goal. a clinician asks “what would you like to be different in six months.” that question leaves me with a small hum in the chest where an answer should be. i would like, broadly, to thumb the wallet less often. i would like, also, to keep thumbing it, because the wallet is the only object in the household that does not, in any operational sense, lie. those are not the same goal.

the heavy use of the noun, in this household, is itself a verdict and a punctuation mark. therapy, by extension, would be the appeal. i have not been ready to file an appeal on a verdict i have, on most days, half-agreed with.

the books-on-tape audio i started instead

instead of booking, i started a books-on-tape audio. it is, by the cluster’s hot take collection, a cheating format — books on tape are cheating is on the file, and the file does not retract. the audio was a man with a low voice reading a paperback i had, in 2019, bought at an airport and never opened. the audio version came free with an app i had forgotten i subscribed to.

a low voice reading the third chapter of a self-help-adjacent paperback is not therapy. it is, on the relevant rung, closer to the radio version of being talked at. it does the thing therapy does — fills the room with a calm voice that is not mine — without the small inconvenience of a clinician asking the six-month question. i pressed play at 11:08 and let chapter three run while i thumbed the wallet. by 11:24 the chapter was over. by 11:34, i had not booked anything.

that, in the household i pretend to keep, is therapy adjacent. it is not therapy. the difference between the two words is, on an honest reading, the entire post.

verdict, therapy is for people who answer the phone

slack notification, finance: “circling back on the receipts.” i have not, in any active sense, opened the slack. the wallet is on the wood. dave’s two rings are logged on the phone screen with the small red badge i have learned to read past.

↑