compulsive lying illness — 1 fairly sure investigation

the unopened mail pile is the part of the apartment that lies for me. compulsive lying illness, the article said, blurs the start of the week into the end of it. i prefer the start. the end demands plans. maggie understood this. the receipt wallet, expanding, also understands.

at the desk, a tuesday, the kind that is not yet a wednesday. carla is upstairs at an all-hands on the third floor, two folders deep. i have, on the clock, the rest of the morning before any of this is anyone’s problem but mine.

so. compulsive lying illness. the phrase arrived in my browser the way most phrases arrive — autocompleted from a half-question i did not finish typing — and i clicked it because the word “illness” was doing something the word “lying” hadn’t. lying, on its own, is a verb. add “illness” and the verb becomes a weather event. the gerund — the -ing — is what i want to slow down. the lying is an action. the illness, supposedly, is the thing the action belongs to. these are not the same noun. one of them is a behaviour you can watch in real time. the other is a category you can point at after the fact.

that’s the move, and i would like, in the next thirteen hundred words, to refuse the move while admitting i have made it. for the wider chart of where this rung sits among its cousins, i keep updating the rung-chart of liar-adjacent words in a paragraph i never close. this post is the action-side of that chart. the cousin post on the noun-side of the chart, which is to say compulsive liar as a person rather than lying as a verb, is the working definition of a compulsive liar. read whichever cousin you came for. they argue, gently, with each other.

compulsive lying illness, the desk draft

the desk draft, the one i’m typing into a tab carla cannot see, goes like this. compulsive lying illness is a phrase that takes a behaviour and reclassifies it as a passive event. the behaviour is the lying. the event, allegedly, is the illness. the trick is in the suffix. -ing tells you something is happening. illness tells you something has happened to you. when you put them together, you get a sentence in which the verb has been quietly drugged.

i am, by my own audit, a man who lies in three or four small ways before lunch. i tell my landlord the kitchen sink is “doing better”. i tell the man who calls, by not picking up, that i’m unreachable. i tell the receipt wallet i’ll sort it on the weekend. these are actions. they are choices i make with my hands and my voice and my decision not to slide a thumb across a green button. nothing about the choices is happening to me. they are happening, exactly, by me.

so when the page i clicked through called this entire menu of choices an “illness”, i closed the tab. not out of indignation. out of recognition. i recognised the move because i make the move. i call the unopened mail pile “the situation”, which makes it sound geographical instead of postal. i call the voicemail “full” instead of “abandoned”. i call my own avoidance “a system”. the language i use about my own behaviour is, on the books, a small, polite, daily lying illness. so. fine. caught.

maggie would call this a phase, maggie has employees

this is where maggie comes in, mostly because maggie would, if she were on this thread, be unimpressed in a useful way. maggie — three coffees in 2019, a small brunch place on a corner with a chalkboard, now runs a small business with employees on a payroll she actually files — uses the word “phase” for behaviours other people call illnesses. it is, for the record, a sturdier word. a phase implies a beginning and an end. an illness implies a stretcher.

i remember her, vividly, on a saturday morning in the brunch place she did not yet own, listening to a man at the next table describe his “lying issues” as a long-term medical condition. maggie, behind the counter, said nothing to him. on the way out, she said to me, into the air, “that’s a phase he likes the rent on”. that line has lived rent-free in my head ever since, which is appropriate, because it was about rent.

maggie is, in my own taxonomy, the patron saint of refusing soft nouns. she would, looking at the search term compulsive lying illness, ask one question: “is the person lying about whether they are lying?” if yes, it’s a behaviour with branding. if no, it’s something else, and the something else has its own room and you don’t get to write a blog post in it. she had, even at three coffees a week, more diagnostic clarity than the wellness page i closed in the autosuggestion bar.

the difference between maggie’s “phase” and the wellness page’s “illness” is, structurally, the difference between a tuesday morning and a sofa. one assumes the person can do something about it on a tuesday. the other assumes the person is, for the foreseeable future, on the sofa. people who reach for “illness” are, frequently, reaching for the sofa. i recognise the reach. the sofa, in my apartment, has — and i will admit this only here — a depression in the second cushion that perfectly fits a man pretending to be unwell.

A. VERB. IS. NOT. A. WEATHER. EVENT.

the unopened mail as my actual chart

let me put a chart on the desk, because the wellness page had no charts, only paragraphs in a calming font. my chart is the unopened mail pile. the pile, by the door, is, by my count, sixteen envelopes thick. four of them are red. one of them is in a window envelope from the part of the post office i avoid for reasons that read, on a strict definition of a compulsive liar, as evasive. the pile is, on the kitchen rug, doing more diagnostic work than any noun the wellness page deployed at me.

here is what the pile tells me, on tuesdays. the pile tells me i am, currently, lying about my affairs being in order. the lying is daily. the lying is functional. the lying is, on a strict count, compulsive in the dictionary sense — it happens without a clear pause for me to consider whether to do it. i walk past the pile in the morning. i do not open the pile. that is the action. nothing about the action is involuntary. it just feels involuntary because the alternative — opening the pile — would cost an amount of energy i have spent the morning saving for a meeting on the third floor i’m not going to.

so is that, technically, an illness? on the wellness page’s definition, yes — the pattern is daily, the avoidance is consistent, the distress is measurable in the small clench i get walking past the door. on maggie’s definition, no — the behaviour is a phase i could end on any saturday with a kettle and a recycling bag and a willingness to spend the morning learning what i owe. the pile is a chart on which both readings are technically true, which is, frankly, the most honest thing in the apartment.

i chose, on this morning, the wellness page’s reading, because it lets me write this post instead of opening the four red envelopes. that is the lying. that is the illness, if i’m soft about it. that is the phase, if i’m honest about it. it is, on the desk between us, the same pile.

why “illness” borrows authority i did not earn

here is the section where i will admit the working theft. when a person reaches for the word illness to describe a behaviour, the person is borrowing authority from a category that has nothing to do with them. the authority belongs to medicine. medicine has, over a long century, earned the noun by, broadly, treating things that respond to treatment. lying, in the daily sense, is not a thing a working professional treats with a course of anything. lying is a thing you stop doing on the morning you decide to stop doing it, which most of us never do, because the lying is, for now, paying its own rent.

so when i call my behaviour an illness, i am, structurally, picking up a borrowed badge from a profession i have never visited and pinning it to my own conduct. it is, in the trade, a lie. it is the small kind of lie that hides inside a gentle word. it is, on my own rung-chart, the rung directly under “calling the pile a system”. which is to say, the rung i live on most days.

i am not saying the borrowing is unforgivable. small linguistic theft is, in a society that has run out of better words, almost a public utility. i am saying the borrowing is the thing the post is about. once you notice you are doing it, you cannot, in fairness, keep doing it without a small interior cough. that’s what this post is. it is a small interior cough.

when the word is fair and when it is performance

i would like, before i wrap up, to acknowledge the room where the word is fair. there are presentations of compulsive lying — sustained, distressing, attached to other patterns that the person genuinely cannot stop without help — where calling the situation an illness is the kindest, most useful, and most accurate move available. those presentations exist. those rooms exist. those rooms are not, statistically, the room most search bars are typing the phrase from.

the test, drawn at this desk: if the word “illness” sends you, this week, to a room with a working professional in it, the word has earned itself. if the word sends you, this week, to a tab on a wellness page that lets you sit on the sofa for another month, the word is a costume. for cinematic context on the high end of the genre — a man whose lying becomes its own pageant rather than a private behaviour — the 2002 dreamworks picture about a teenage cheque forger and the agent who chased him is the public shorthand. that is not the rung most of us are on. most of us are on the rung where the costume is exactly comfortable enough for a tuesday.

and a tuesday, by the way, is — per HT9, which i still defend at the bar — objectively better than a friday. mondays are objectively better than fridays. tuesdays are the warm-up to the part of the week i keep saying i’ll spend opening the pile. i never spend it on the pile. but i spend it well. the spending is the lie. the lie is the routine. the routine, calling itself an illness, is the move i’m refusing in the title and admitting in the body.

verdict, my illness is a calendar i do not check

so here we are, the tuesday morning of it, with the all-hands still ongoing on the third floor and the receipt wallet bulging at my elbow like a soft, unoffical organ. compulsive lying illness, as a phrase, is mostly a search term that lets the verb wear a coat. it is not, in the way a working clinician would mean it, a category. it is, in the way a working sunday afternoon means it, an excuse with grammar.

i am, by my own count, a man who lies in small, daily, financially-motivated ways and calls it a system. the system has, this morning, sixteen unopened envelopes in it. the system has a voicemail still full from august. the system has the receipt wallet i have, in the wider working theory of the everyday idiot, called my “filing apparatus” without ever filing anything. the wider idiot in that post is a softer cousin of this one. the idiot, on a strict reading, is the man who agrees with the page that calls his routine an illness. i would, against my own evidence, rather not be that idiot today.

so my verdict, drawn at the desk: my illness is a calendar i do not check. the calendar is, on a tuesday, fine. on a friday, less fine. on the sunday i will eventually open the pile, the calendar will be a different document with my own handwriting on it, and the word “illness” will not be required for any of it. the word the page sold me was a coat. the action under the coat is mine.

all-hands let out. carla just walked past with both folders and a coffee that wasn’t there at 9. she did not look in. that is a tuesday neutral. the morning is, as ever, mine for another forty minutes.

the pile, as of the start of the post, was sixteen envelopes thick, four red, one in a window envelope. the pile, as of the end of the post, is the same pile. the writing did not open the pile. the writing rarely does. the receipt wallet, by my elbow, has, by quick count, eighty-three receipts in it, the oldest of which is from a brunch place that, by now, has employees on a payroll. that is, by maggie’s chart, a phase she finished and i have not.

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