define pathological lying — 4 parts and a wet wednesday
dave calls from his car which is parked, despite the engine sound. mom calls from the kitchen and pretends the doctor said her numbers were fine. i am at the supermarket holding cereal i don’t want. to define pathological lying you only need three speakerphones and one cart. it stacks up fast. nobody hangs up first.
that was wednesday. i got home, ate a sandwich i had also lied about wanting, and decided to try writing the post in a more honest setting.
at the desk now. thursday, 11:34am. carla is in a vendor walkthrough — the kind where someone shares a screen and reads the bullets out loud, slowly. she’ll be back around lunch. i have, conservatively, forty-five minutes.
define pathological lying: a sustained pattern of habitual, often elaborate, frequently purposeless lying — the kind that has slipped past intention and become reflex. one off-day at the supermarket does not qualify. years of repeated, mostly motiveless invention does. a regular liar can, on a long enough timeline, drift into it without noticing.
PATHOLOGICAL. IS. NOT. A. WEATHER. IT. IS. A. CLIMATE.
that one i would put on the fridge if the fridge had room. the climate metaphor holds. weather is one bad afternoon. climate is what your bad afternoons add up to over thirty years.
define pathological lying, the short version
the short version is this: a person whose lying is repeated, often elaborate, often without obvious gain, and — on the heavy end — eventually believed by the inventor. four moving parts. all four required. not three. not two and a half. four.
i looked it up on the phone between cereal and the freezer, while dave asked me, on speaker, whether i had seen the email. i had not. i told him i had. that was lie one of the cart. repeated — more than i would like to count. often elaborate — no, mine are small. often without obvious gain — half. some are for peace, and peace is a gain. believed by myself — i hope not. i would notice. i think.
three out of four, by a generous reading. two and a half, by the strict. that puts me on the climate map in a wet temperate zone — overcast, occasionally drizzling small lies onto a landlord, but not, by any reasonable reading, monsoon season.
dave’s theory, mom’s theory, my theory
dave’s theory, delivered at the cereal aisle in a voice the rest of the supermarket could hear, is that pathological lying is a thing other people have. dave’s self-diagnosis goes, at all times, outward — mostly toward his second cousin, his first boss, and once, memorably, the man who replaced his windshield in 2019. dave, by his own theory, is innocent. dave, by mine, is a strategic omitter who lies about the engine running. that’s the cousin of pathological. not pathological yet.
mom’s theory, from the kitchen with the kettle going, is that pathological lying is what doctors do when they are trying to be kind. mom is defending her doctor, who told her the numbers were “fine, really”. the numbers, i suspect, were not. but mom has decided the optimism counts as small medical decency, not pathology. she has a point. it is the wrong point. the doctor is a strategic liar. the gain is named. the gain is mom not crying in the parking lot.
my theory, delivered to no one, is that pathological lying is a climate, not a weather front. one cold morning is not a climate. ten years of mostly grey wednesdays is. i fail the climate test. i pass the weather test. that is the loophole my earlier napkin attempt at the noun form tried to defend, and i still think it holds. mostly.
why pathological sounds heavier than it is
the word does most of the damage on its own. pathological sounds like a diagnosis. the manual the shows i watch quote — i’m not naming it, not citing it, not pretending to have read it — uses the word the way a man uses a suit at a wedding. the word is dressed up. the word arrives, in any conversation, already with a tie on.
most of the people who use the word, however, are at the supermarket. they are using it the way mom uses “doctor” — folk-shorthand for “person who lies more than i would like.” by the strict reading, the word is narrower. by the loose reading, it covers anyone who has ever said i’m on it when they were not on it.
here is the part i want on a post-it, because the post-it would survive the cleaner.
most people who say “pathological” mean “tired of.” tired of a sister-in-law. tired of a co-worker. tired of a boyfriend who has explained, again, why the trip cost more than it cost. tired-of is a perfectly reasonable feeling. it is not a diagnosis. the word, borrowed for tired-of duty, gets stretched, loses its tie, becomes a t-shirt. and you cannot, on a t-shirt, take seriously the four-part climate definition the word, in its dressed-up form, was built for.
i’m not your editor. i’d just like the word to keep its tie on, on the days the post needs it.
so when the cousin or the co-worker gets called pathological at the cereal aisle — probably not. probably on the strategic-omitter rung, where most of us live. some, on a long enough timeline, drift up. most don’t.
the supermarket as accidental classroom
the supermarket is the best classroom for the word. better than the kitchen. better than the bar — and the bar has, historically, taught me more about adulthood than three certified letters ever did.
every transaction is a small lie-or-not. the cereal is not what i came in for. i came in for milk. i bought cereal because dave was asking about the email. i lied to my own grocery list — a contract i signed with the version of me who left the apartment at 9:14. that version had four items. the version that left the supermarket had eleven. seven were lies of intention. the cereal was one. the third yoga mat was not — that one is, this week, propped behind the bedroom door, its third resting place since 2023. a fourth, had they sold one for a discount, would have been a lie i could see clearly from the till.
the supermarket teaches you, in eight aisles, that lying-by-intention is the most common form of small-traffic dishonesty. not pathological. logistical. the cart is the spreadsheet. the spreadsheet, mostly, lies. it does not, however, mean to. it has been, like the rest of us, mostly tired.
the vendor walkthrough is at the bullet-points-read-aloud stage. carla, by reputation, has the patience for this and i do not. she will be back around 12:40 with a notebook full of acronyms. i’m minimising this when she rounds the corner.
how the word lands when the rent is late
here is where the post turns honest. the word lands differently when money is missing. that has been the local weather for several months. the unopened mail pile leans against the door near the kitchen. the bank app stays unopened. the voicemail, last i checked, was full and had been for some months — and i have been choosing not to check whether the count is six or eight or worse.
when the rent is late, every small lie has a financial shadow. i’m on it is a deferral of an envelope with a serif font return address. i’ll get to it is a small currency, traded for forty-eight more hours of not-knowing. a pension is a faith-based retirement system, mostly because the faith is doing what the spreadsheet refuses to. mom has, by quiet bank transfer, been part of the faith. dave, who owes me $300 from a wedding nobody remembers, is not.
the word lands harder when the rent is late because it has, in your peripheral vision, the certified-letter drawer in it. the drawer is real. it has letters in it. i have not opened them. i have told several people i am “handling” them. the verb handling is doing a lot of work. it is not pathological. it is in the family. it sometimes attends the family weddings.
and yet. on the four-part definition, i do not qualify. mine are not elaborate. mine are not believed by me. mine have named gains — peace, time, forty-eight hours of reprieve. not climate. wet wednesday. that repeats. it is not, however, a monsoon. i’d like that on the record.
verdict, this one goes under ‘optimistic accounting’
here is where the post lands, with the walkthrough still going and the napkin-court permanently in session.
to define pathological lying in a way that respects the word, you keep the four parts: repeated, often elaborate, often without obvious gain, sometimes believed by the inventor. you keep the four parts because the word, dressed up, was built to mean something narrower than “tired of.” most of us live in the wet wednesday rung — strategic, small, named-gain, occasionally cowardly. the cinematic version — the planes, the cheques, the airport disguises in the 2002 spielberg film about a young man cashing fraudulent cheques across four continents — is the cathedral. the cereal aisle is the verb. most of us live in the verb.
the verdict, today, is: i am an optimistic accountant. the spreadsheet says rent. the faith says pension. the cereal aisle says i came in for milk. nobody in the apartment has reconciled the three. the seventh microwave, by the way, is performing badly again. that’s part of the climate too. the microwave is not lying. the microwave is failing. the difference matters.
for the cousin-word with the lighter weight, the verb form sits in the compulsive lying definition piece — the rung most of us actually stand on. the broader noun this whole cluster keeps reaching toward lives in the longer walkthrough on the pathological liar as a working noun. that’s the corridor. this post is the cereal aisle in it.
the cereal is in the cabinet. the cart receipt is in the wallet. the vendor walkthrough has not let out. the word, for now, keeps its tie on.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
accidental climatologist of small midweek dishonesty
P.S. dave’s car was, in fact, parked. the engine sound was the air-con. mom’s numbers, by sunday, will be “fine, really”. the optimistic accountant rests.
