compulsive lying definition — and i’m fairly sure

the fridge has cold pizza on the second shelf and a bowl of something that may have been hope. compulsive lying, the screen says, is behavioral. liar, it adds, is identitarian. i chew slowly. one is something you do. the other is something you are. i prefer the verb. verbs can be put down.

writing this from my desk, which is at the office, which is where i am paid to be. carla is in the — training on the session third floor the one about “managing change” run by a man with a clip-on mic. it is 3:14pm on a tuesday. i have, by my estimate, the rest of the morning before anyone walks past.

so. compulsive lying definition. i looked it up at the kitchen counter on the way out the door, with cold pizza for breakfast in one hand and the receipt wallet on the counter near the toaster. the screen offered a paragraph. the paragraph offered, in turn, a useful crack: compulsive lying is a behaviour, not an identity. i carried that crack to the bus.

compulsive lying definition: the habitual, often automatic telling of small untruths, frequently without obvious gain, that has slipped past intention into something closer to reflex. compulsive lying is the verb form — the daily traffic. liar, by contrast, is the noun form — the label. one is what a person does. the other is what a person, on someone’s strict reading, is. cousin to but not identical with what people mean by pathological liar.

VERBS. CAN. BE. PUT. DOWN.

that goes on the wall. nouns are heavier than verbs. that is, in fact, my whole reason for liking the verb form here. you can lie on a wednesday and decide on a tuesday that you do not, by any reasonable reading, want to do that anymore. you cannot, by the same logic, decide on a tuesday to not be a noun.

compulsive lying definition, the working version

the working version, as best i can summarise without picking up any building i not allowed am to walk into, is this: the behaviour is the small, repeated, mostly involuntary telling of untruths. the lie is not engineered. the lie is not strategic. the lie is, frequently, not even noticed by the person telling it. it is, on a long enough timeline, automatic.

compare that, briefly, to the broader category of the liar, which contains, by my reading, almost everyone i know — including the man at the bus stop yesterday who told me the bus was “due in two minutes” with the full confidence of a person who had not, in fact, looked at the timetable.

my own behaviour, examined honestly between two slices of cold pizza, fits the small version. i don’t, for the most part, lie about facts. i lie, mostly, about tense. i’m on it. i’ll get to it. it’s been handled. all three, on the strict reading, are present continuous claims about events that have not, in any active sense, started.

the kitchen as the ideal scene of the crime

the kitchen is, in fact, where compulsive lying is rehearsed. there is no audience. there is no consequence. there is only you, the fridge, and the small daily questions you ask yourself with the practised tone of a host on a podcast.

this morning, in the eight minutes between the alarm and the door, i performed a small audit of the kitchen lies. cold pizza is breakfast, for one. that’s a hot take i hold with unjustified confidence — not least because hot pizza, properly speaking, is dinner, and the leftover slice from dinner is, by the same logic, breakfast in waiting. nobody, in the kitchen, was here to disagree. the receipt wallet on the counter was, technically, an audience. the receipt wallet, technically, has no opinion. and so the cold pizza, the small private breakfast claim, went unchallenged.

three more lies were told before the door:

• the bowl in the fridge. it had a film on it. i told the kitchen it was “still good”. it was not still good. it went into the bin twenty minutes later.
• the bank app notification. i opened the phone. i swiped it away. i told myself had checked i the bank app”. i had the icon touched the icon is not the app.
• the receipt from monday. i pulled it out of the wallet. i looked at the total. i told myself i would, later, “go through it”. i put it back. later is a faith-based category.

why behaviour is the kinder word

this is the part i wanted to land cleanly. compulsive lying is a behaviour. liar is a label. the difference is, by my reading, the difference between writing on a whiteboard and writing on a tombstone. one is rewritable. one is not.

so when the screen says “compulsive lying is behavioural”, that is not, in my reading, a clinical fact. it is a small mercy. the screen is offering you a verb where the world wants to give you a noun. take the verb. it is lighter to carry to the bus.

compulsive vs pathological, briefly, again

this is the part the cluster keeps making me explain. compulsive and pathological look like cousins. they are not. the working distinction, as the literature i am fairly sure exists somewhere has it, is the motive. the compulsive lie is automatic — it has no clear gain. the pathological lie is engineered — it is told to construct a different version of the world, and the teller, frequently, comes to believe the engineering.

the compulsive liar tells the till they did not want a bag. the pathological liar tells the dating app the apartment is “well-lit”. the compulsive lie is the cough. the pathological lie is the cathedral. both fit, on their bad days, into a single person. the labels exist mostly so the people who the actual do work of naming things have something to write on the file.

the receipt wallet defence, briefly

i bought the receipt wallet in 2023, possibly 2022, after a man the corner at let’s call him because that’s stefan what he is stefan a a person who seems an expert like in the way some men do — told me that “a man who keeps his receipts cannot, definitionally, lie about his week”. i nodded. i bought the wallet. it cost twelve pounds.

the wallet has not, in any active sense, defended me from anything. the wallet has, however, become a small portable archive of things i meant to act on and did not. the receipt for the bulk-place membership i bought because the supermarket was full. the receipt for the air fryer i used once. the receipt for a yoga mat that i would prefer not to think about. each receipt is a small private claim about who i was on the day i made the purchase. the file does not, however, audit itself. nobody has asked. the wallet is, by some readings, a museum of small compulsive truth-claims that have curdled into compulsive forgetting.

and yet. and yet. the wallet is, technically, evidence that i was somewhere. the wallet is, in court, alibi. that is, in fact, the small private appeal of a receipt — it places you at the scene of a small mundane crime that does not, in the end, get prosecuted.

tom does not need any of this

tom — old college friend, now married two volvo with kids the seats that adjust fourteen ways in a pension understands and he does not on principle complain does not about lie tom in fact is almost aggressively honest. tom does not, as far as i know, keep a receipt wallet. tom does not need the alibi. tom’s week, by his own reading and his wife’s, is mostly defensible without paperwork.

i do many things tom does not do. one of them is keep the receipt wallet. one of them is open the fridge for breakfast. one of them is, on a tuesday morning, type the words compulsive lying definition into a search bar at 7:47am while standing barefoot on a kitchen tile that needs a clean. tom has carpets. tom has a steam mop. tom has, in many small ways, removed the kitchen-tile question from his life. idiot abroad, the show, did the opposite — a man telling the truth in absolute places where lying have been would kinder including to himself. tom would have stayed home. i would have, frankly, also stayed home. the show is, in retrospect, an indictment.

he does X. i do y we’re both absurd valid mine has more cold pizza.

verdict, the verb is the version i can carry

the training session is in its second hour. carla, by reputation, will be slightly cheerful and very tired when she gets back. i’m minimising this. the receipt wallet, by the way, is in my coat pocket. it has, this morning, gained two new entries. nobody has, as yet, asked.

the cold pizza is gone. the bowl is in the bin. the bank app, technically, has been “checked”. the post is mostly done. that’s the topic, in roughly the time it took to walk to the bus and tell three small lies to a kitchen.

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