pathological liar definition — i looked into it

i read the words pathological liar twice and felt examined. then i remembered tom, who once said he was into me for two years and meant it for three weeks. i looked the term up and decided it does not apply to a man who simply does not answer the phone. dodging is not lying. it is just a quieter kind.

at my desk again. carla, upstairs, in the budget meeting — the one where they discuss Q2 numbers in voices that suggest Q2 was, on balance, a mistake. i have, by my count, fifty minutes. the barista, separately, is two blocks away and knows my order. she is not, technically, in this room. just in the post.

so. pathological liar definition. i typed it into the search bar this morning, between an email i did not open and a voicemail i did not check. i wanted, i think, to be cleared. i wanted some authority — a slim paragraph, a cool tone — to look at me and say not you, friend, you are merely a man with bad mail habits. that was the goal. the goal was acquittal.

pathological liar definition: a person who lies habitually, often without obvious reason, in ways that cross from occasional fib into something compulsive and ongoing. the lying tends to be repeated, hard to stop, and frequently unprompted. one fib at a monday dinner does not qualify. a steady, daily traffic in small invented things — that does. somewhere on that road, a regular liar turns into a different animal.

DODGING. IS. NOT. LYING. ALLEGEDLY.

i stand by that header for now. i may revise it by paragraph nine.

pathological liar definition, the short version

the short version is the one i wanted. three lines. cool tone. clean exit. what i found, instead, was a longer paragraph than expected, with the kind of careful hedging you put around a claim when you would prefer not to be sued.

the working idea, as best i can summarise without quoting any building i am not allowed to walk into: a pathological liar is someone whose lying is habitual, repetitive, and frequently unprompted. it is not the lie at a job interview. it is not the lie about whether you finished the report. it is the lying as posture, as default setting, as the way the day comes out of the mouth. one lie is a monday. a thousand lies, ungoverned, that’s the category.

my own behaviour, i decided, fails to qualify on a technicality. i don’t lie. i let the phone ring. that is, by the strictest reading, a different verb.

the clinical history, briefly, before it got messy

here is what i have pieced together from sources i will not name and do not entirely remember. the term has been around for a while — it predates most of the people currently using it — and was once treated as a separate, named condition in the literature i’m fairly sure exists. then the categories shifted. then the categories shifted again. then somebody, in a room i will never sit in, decided the label was perhaps too clean for what it was trying to describe. so it became, in a lot of places, a feature of other things rather than a thing in its own right.

i find this both irritating and clarifying. irritating because i wanted a single tidy file. clarifying because the people who do the actual work of naming these things keep, to their credit, admitting the names are slippery. the slippage is the point. the slippage is what makes the man on the phone hard to label. the slippage is, frankly, why we are here on a wednesday morning instead of doing real work.

how the definition reads vs how it lives in my apartment

on paper, a pathological liar is loud. they invent. they perform. they say, with the brave face of a man at a poker table, that they were on the moon last april. that’s the cinematic version. the cinematic version has a soundtrack. the version most people picture is that catch me if you can movie from 2002 — a young man cashing cheques, flying planes, smiling at a stewardess. that’s the postcard. that’s the trailer.

in my apartment, the version is quieter. in my apartment, there is a voicemail box that has been full for eight months. there is a drawer of certified letters i have not opened. there is, on the kitchen counter, a pile of mail leaning at a slight architectural angle. nobody, on paper, has lied. but somewhere in there, by omission, a story is being told to anyone who would care to check. the story is i’m fine, i’m reachable, the matter is being handled. the story is, on its face, untrue.

there is a man at the corner — let’s call him stefan, because that’s what he is, a stefan, a person who seems like an expert in the way some men do, with the beard and the slow nod — who said something to me last week that has not left my head. stefan said, with his usual unearned authority, “the lie is not the words. the lie is the silence around the words.” i nodded. i bought him a beer. i did not, technically, agree. i did not, technically, disagree. that, in itself, may have been a small lie. stefan did not notice. stefan was looking at his phone.

and yet. and yet. is that lying. is that just the modern condition. is that the thing the textbook is reaching toward when it says habitual. i don’t know. the kettle clicked. i moved on.

tom would never qualify, i probably do

tom — old college friend, now married, two kids, volvo with the seats that adjust in fourteen ways, a pension he understands and does not, on principle, complain about — does not lie. tom is, in fact, almost aggressively honest. tom will tell you the meal was fine. tom will tell you the gift was nice. tom will, if pressed, tell you the haircut you got at home was visibly a haircut you got at home. tom does not need to lie because tom has constructed a life where the truth is mostly flattering to him.

i, on the other hand, have constructed a life in which the truth requires editing. so i edit. i edit by not picking up. i edit by leaving the envelope sealed. i edit by saying “i’ll get to it” when in fact “it” is being filed under a category called “later”, and “later” is a faith-based category. tom would call this lying. tom would, in fact, be slightly correct. tom does many irritating things in our friendship, and one of them is being slightly correct.

he does X. i do Y absurd. we’re both valid. mine has fewer phone bills.

examples i recognize from my own week

this week, in chronological order, in a voice as flat as i can keep it:

• monday: the bank app sent a notification. i marked it as read without opening it. i then told myself i had “checked the bank app”. that’s, in the strictest reading, untrue. i had touched the icon. the icon is not the app.
• monday: someone at the corner asked how the seventh microwave was holding up — the seventh, i should say, because the previous six were lost in incidents i would prefer not to revisit on company time. i said “great, no issues”. the microwave plate has not spun in three weeks. great is a generous word for what the microwave is doing.
• wednesday: i told the barista i was reading a book. i was, in fact, listening to a book on a phone, on the walk from the bus, with one airpod (the binaural option is a luxury i no longer afford). some people, including a guy at the corner — bearded, certain, holding an opinion like a cup — will tell you that’s not reading. reading on a kindle is the same as reading, and by the same logic, listening to the book through one ear, while walking, is the same as reading. i stand by that. i will not be taking questions.
• thursday: i told myself i would call my mother back “later”. later is, again, the category. she called me. mothers know. they have a homing signal. it cannot be defeated.
• friday: did not happen yet. it is currently wednesday. i’m scheduling a small lie for friday in advance. that’s, in the long view, possibly more honest than the alternative.

five small adjustments to reality in five days. one is a monday. five, the textbook would suggest, is a small pattern. or a working week. it is hard, sometimes, to tell.

verdict, the definition fits if you squint

carla is back. she has a small folder. that, historically, has not been a good sign for me. the third yoga mat lives, lately, beneath the sofa, untouched at home, possibly evolving its own ecosystem. i’m minimising this tab.

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