pathological liar — a line i refuse to cross

there is a line between liar and pathological liar and i refuse to cross it the way some men refuse to cross picket lines. i lie to mom about her doctor’s visits. i lie to mike about whether i ate. i lie to the certified letter on the counter. but i have not yet lied about my own name, which i consider a kind of integrity.

at the desk. tuesday. training on the third floor. carla took a notebook in, which means she’ll come out with at least one bullet point and a strong opinion about it.

so. pathological liar. the phrase has weight. it shows up in films, in true-crime threads, in the kind of facebook post your aunt shares about a cousin’s ex. in the literature i have, in fact, read parts of — at the kind of websites that put words like “trait” and “pattern” in helpful little boxes — it sits at the heaviest end of the lying scale. it is not the same thing as a regular liar. it is also not the same as a compulsive liar, which is a separate rung i have been told i sometimes brush against.

pathological liar: a person whose lying is chronic, habitual, and frequently disconnected from any clear external benefit. unlike a strategic liar (lies for gain) or a compulsive liar (lies as a reflex under pressure), the pathological liar lies persistently across contexts, often invents elaborate stories, and may, in some cases, come to believe the inventions themselves. one lie does not qualify. one elaborate, unprovoked, unprofitable lie a week, sustained for years, is a working hypothesis.

PATHOLOGICAL. IS. NOT. A. SYNONYM. FOR. MESSY.

that one i’d write on a post-it if i thought i could find a post-it. people use “pathological liar” the way they use “narcissist” — as a strong word for a person they are tired of. the word, in its real sense, is more specific than that. it describes a small, particular subset of people who lie in a way the rest of us, even on our worst phone-call-dodging tuesday, do not. it is, in my own personal accounting, a line i refuse to cross. mostly because i don’t have the energy for it. but partly because it scares me.

what pathological liar means, on the clinical end

i looked it up. obviously. the place i looked it up was, broadly, a website that knows things, and the working sentence i kept seeing was this: pathological lying is a sustained pattern of habitual, often elaborate, and frequently purposeless lying that the liar may, over time, come to believe.

three things in there matter. sustained. not a tuesday. not a bad year. years. purposeless. not for money, not for cover, not for kindness. believed. the liar, eventually, loses the ability to keep their own ledger straight, and the inventions and the events become a single, blurred document.

this last part is what makes the rung scary. a regular liar can, in the morning, recover the truth. they know they lied. they have a private file. a pathological liar, on the heavy end, has, over time, lost custody of that file. the inventions have been re-shelved. the inventions are now memory. that is a different country.

the difference between strategic and pathological, drawn at this desk

here is the distinction i would put on the wall, if i had a printer and the courage to use it. a strategic liar lies for a reason and can name the reason. a pathological liar lies for no reason that anyone, including the liar, can clearly name.

this matters because most of us are strategic liars on most days. we lie to landlords about sinks. we lie to mothers about being fine. we lie to bosses about progress. we lie to ourselves about the pile of unopened mail leaning gently against the door. all of those lies have reasons. you can list the reasons. the reasons are, mostly, “i did not have the energy for the true answer right then”.

the pathological liar does not have a list. ask them why they told the man at the petrol station that they used to play professional rugby in argentina, and they will not have a coherent answer. they may not even remember saying it. that’s the rung. that’s the line.

which brings me to my own private theory of where i sit. i am, by my count, three to five small lies a week. all of them have reasons. the reasons are mostly money or sleep. that’s strategic. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. i don’t open the mail because opening it costs energy i don’t have, and the lying-by-omission that follows is, frankly, the cheapest form of self-care available to me on a tuesday.

examples of pathological lying, observed, not performed

i would like to be clear: i am not, in this section, confessing. i am reporting. these are people i have known, briefly, and not enjoyed.

example one. a man i met, exactly twice, in 2019, told me, in a single forty-minute conversation, that he had been (a) a session musician for a band whose name i recognised, (b) briefly a translator at a small embassy, and (c) the personal trainer of someone in television. each of these had specific dates. each of them had supporting details. one of them, when i casually checked, was not just untrue but mildly impossible. i did not bring it up. i had nothing to gain. but i clocked it. that’s example one. one is a tuesday. you’d file it. you’d move on.

example two. the same man, six months later, in a different room, told a different group, with me sitting there, that he had been a session musician for a band whose name i recognised — and the band was different. that’s the rung. that’s not strategy. that’s a man who has, at some point, decided that the texture of having been a session musician matters more to him than the boring detail of which band. the band was a variable. the variable was running.

i have, since 2019, met three other people in this category. that is, i’m fairly sure, statistically slightly above average. but it might also be that, once you know the rung exists, you start spotting it in the wild. the way you start seeing a particular car after a friend buys one.

the case for being a regular liar, on a tuesday

here is, however, my mild defence — not of the pathological end, which i think is genuinely a problem, but of the ordinary, working, strategic-omitter rung that most of us are on.

i told the landlord, on monday, that the kitchen sink was “doing better”. it was not doing better. doing better was a generous read of doing the same thing, only more loudly. that lie cost the landlord nothing. it cost me a forty-minute conversation i did not have. it bought me, conservatively, four days of peace. on a strict reading, that’s a lie. on a tuesday reading, that’s logistics. it’s also, if i’m being honest, a small piece of confirmation bias — i decided the sink was “doing better” because i wanted it to be, and the sound, that morning, cooperated.

i did not pick up the phone twice this week. once on tuesday, once this morning. both times the number was unknown. both times i told myself it was, statistically, a scam. it might have been. it might also have been the man who calls. you’ll notice i have not specified which. i have, in fact, been carefully not-specifying this for several months. the voicemail, by the way, is full. that is, in its quiet way, also a lie of omission. the caller is being told i am unreachable. i am reachable. i just don’t want to be, in this specific direction.

none of that, on the rung-chart, is pathological. it is strategic, financial, and, yes, slightly cowardly. but it has reasons. the reasons are, in order: tiredness, cost, and a private, unwritten policy that the day starts when i decide it does. those are the reasons. you may agree or disagree. they are, however, on the books. they are nameable. that’s the difference.

verdict, there’s a hierarchy and i’d like to be clear about my floor

training session let out. carla came back with the notebook closed and a small pastry. i suspect she got the pastry by being there on time. that’s a moral i’ll consider later.

the unopened mail pile, fourteen envelopes thick, has not moved since the lede. the phone, by my elbow, has not rung since the third paragraph. that’s, on a tuesday, the closest thing to peace this desk gets.

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