Joshua Hunt began lying when he was 10 after becoming self-conscious of the fact his family was poor. Photo / 123RF
OPINION:
When I was 9, my family went on a long, strange road trip. Our destination was Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida, and the cost of admission was a lie.
It was April of 1989 and my parents said the trip couldn't wait until summer break; as the oldest of three children, I had the job of excusing our prolonged absence by telling our school we were headed to a family funeral. I remember being touched by my teachers' condolences, which struck me as genuine, even if the funeral was not.
Staring down the American landscape from the back seat of a rented car, I pondered the logic and suddenness of our trip. We were very poor and had never been on vacation, much less travelled to an amusement park resort. Then there was the decision to drive cross-country to Florida, which hardly seemed practical for a family living on a small island in southeast Alaska. My stepdad was miserable by the time we crossed the Rockies, and I couldn't help wondering why he hadn't chosen to make the much shorter drive to Disneyland, in California. None of it made any sense at all until our last night in Florida, when I woke up to use the bathroom after a long, soda-fuelled day of exploring the Magic Kingdom. Stumbling through our cheap hotel room, I saw my stepdad packing a suitcase with bricks of cocaine — something the television programme Miami Vice had taught me to recognise.
Aside from some new furniture, our lives didn't improve in any material way because of my stepdad's working vacation. We remained poor. But for weeks after we got home from Florida, I was mindful of the person I was now supposed to be: a boy touched by tragedy, still grieving for some lost relative. I was mindful, too, of what could happen to my stepdad if my lies unravelled.
By then I was familiar with the kinds of stories poor people must get used to telling. I'd heard my mum swear that the rent cheque was already in the mail while watching her slip it into an envelope; I knew when she'd passed bad cheques because the owner of the corner store taped them to the back of the cash register until the debt was paid; and I'd read the notes outlining invented reasons I couldn't attend school whenever there were field trips that cost money we didn't have.
If I ever thought of these as lies, I soon came to see them as part of the etiquette of poverty — a means of getting by for the poor, and also a gift we give to the rich; a practice that lets us avoid talking about the uncomfortable differences between us. Over time it becomes second nature. Observing this etiquette doesn't feel dishonest because its falsehoods recognise the deeper truth that many of society's institutions are hostile to the poor. Lying to the landlord keeps a roof over our head. Lying to the social worker keeps our family together. Lying to ourselves allows us to believe it's all going to be OK, somehow, someday.
That kind of lying is not so much learned as imposed. Florida was something different, even if I didn't realise it at first. Being asked to lie about that trip wounded me in some imperceptible way. Soon after we returned I started telling lies of my own.
It began on my 10th birthday. I'd known for years that my family was poor, but it wasn't something I was especially self-conscious about. My best friend, whose family was rich, enjoyed sleepovers at my house just as much as I enjoyed staying over at his: I got the thrill of playing video games and splashing around in his parents' Jacuzzi, while he got to stay up all night watching the kind of movies his parents would never let him see. His parents insisted his twin brother come along for these sleepovers, and for a while that worked out just fine. But at my 10th birthday party my best friend's brother made it clear he was not having fun — the cheap birthday cake and off-brand snacks were not good enough for him, and he complained that there weren't any video games to play at my house. For the first time, I saw myself through his eyes, and it made me feel very alone.
If something changed inside me that day, I didn't feel it. But my behaviour did change. Like many poor people, we were subject to the uncertainty and chaos that comes with a lifetime of bad jobs and worse landlords, and we moved often. The next time we moved, I was careful not to let any of my friends find out where I lived. When someone else's parents took me home from a sleepover or sporting event, I'd give them directions to a nicer house in a nicer neighbourhood, then walk home after they drove away. Sometimes many miles. Instead of a string of low-wage jobs, my mother had a career, and instead of alcoholism my stepdad had health problems.
My fear of being seen for who I really was grew so strong that it became almost limbic — once, while walking home from the grocery store, I broke into a full sprint to avoid a friend who called out to me from down the street. It was pure instinct, like an animal sensing a predator, and when my friend asked about it the next day, it took an elaborate string of lies to convince him I hadn't lost my mind. The fact that I was losing my mind somehow never occurred to me.
At every new school, and in every new town, I laid down whatever inventions I'd been living with since the last time we moved. The first lie was always about something meaningless, like being good at some video game I'd never actually played. It might impress someone, or it might just move the conversation forward. Most of my lies were so inconsequential that they probably never even registered with the people hearing them. But for me they became more false biography to internalise. Instead of the person I was, or even the person I wanted to be, I moved through the world as the person my lies made me.
My facility with the lies of survival informed my more self-serving lies, imbuing them with the texture of a method actor's performance; I spun lies from truth with such skill that I sometimes lost track of which was which. Living with lies is much easier if you can manage to keep them simple. Selling them, on the other hand, requires an ability to conjure the details that make real experiences memorable: Even the most sceptical friend will believe you saw the hottest concert of the summer if your story focuses on the misery of spending the day crushed against a security barricade. No lie was too big or too small, so long as it helped me project an aura of ordinariness.
Lying as a means of coping with poverty had given way to something more pathological. Instead of easing my passage through reality, lying had become a way of denying it altogether. To the extent that lying can become a game, its goals share something in common with gambling: It escalates not because people are hard to fool but because they are so easily fooled that experienced liars grow bored with their habit. The stakes of the gamble, eventually, become life and death; once caught, the person you created evaporates, leaving behind a vapour trail to vex those who thought they knew you. The end game, and perhaps the impulse itself, is as much about self-destruction as self-delusion.
When I left home at the age of 17, the stakes of this game moved beyond the realm of the psyche. With barely enough money for a bus ticket to Los Angeles, where an acquaintance had offered me an internship and a shot at a mailroom job at a small record company, I talked a complete stranger into letting me live in her guest room free until the pay cheques started coming. But the paying job never materialised, so I persuaded a friend to wire me enough money for a bus ticket to Oregon; while fleeing under cover of night, I was caught by the kind homeowner, but convinced her I was only heading to the laundromat after a bout of insomnia. A few months later, I pulled the same stunt with two high school classmates, whose years of friendship earned them a brief note of apology for my sudden exit. The next stop was Minnesota, where I spent weeks living as a stowaway in the dorm room of a girl I'd met online — no easy feat at the College of St. Catherine, an all-girls school, where dozens of students abetted our sinful living arrangement.
In Minneapolis, I got a job as a clerk at a used-record store and somehow made a nice life for myself. But after three years, all my little lies started adding up to something I couldn't quite explain. The longer I held on, the more convinced I became that the people I loved were beginning to see through me. My grip loosened. One night after dinner, I told my girlfriend of two years about seeing the band R.E.M. in concert, simply because a song of theirs came on the radio. But the subject had come up before, so she knew I hadn't seen them. I confessed, awkwardly, and told her I had no idea why I'd blurted out such a silly lie. She forgave me, but things weren't the same, and before long we broke up.
Instead of facing reality, I ran away once more, desperate to preserve the biggest lie of all — that I was normal and that I did not need help — which was so important to me that I abandoned the friends who wanted to help me in favour of seeking out new people I could trick into doing it. I found them in Seattle, where, a little more than a year later, I was arrested, but not charged, for passing bad cheques at a grocery store. Sitting in my jail cell that night, I thought of all my mother's bad cheques taped to the register at the corner store — each of them a lie and a promise kept, eventually, when she could finally afford to pay for the food her children had already eaten.
There was no selflessness in my lies, and no promises to be kept. They held no greater truth. By the time I turned 24, I'd lied and stolen more than I'm comfortable admitting, even now. For the first time in my adult life, I considered the possibility that I had no right.
I began a long process of deprogramming myself, which I approached like an addict in a 12-step programme, except that I had no road map and no fellow travellers. Becoming an honest person, like becoming a liar in the first place, happened by degrees; it was a discipline I had to learn, and practising it sometimes put my friends in the awkward position of hearing a lie and its retraction in the space of 30 seconds. I could envision no other way of going about it: Unlike drinking or doing drugs, lying is a compulsion for which there are no known interventions. To confess to the problem all at once, rather than piecemeal, is to ask the people in your life to assess something that is ultimately unfathomable. Even after honesty became a habit, I still had to learn how ordinary people mete out the truth. I remain prone to oversharing.
I started seeing a therapist, who told me it was not uncommon for the children of alcoholics to hide their shame behind an elaborate facade of lies. And while I think there's something to this, my earliest and most enduring shame was being poor. For years, I thought I could outrun it by denying reality for as long as it took to become middle class. But I now know that I will always be poor; no amount of money will ever change that.
Not so long ago, I hit a rough patch and had to borrow some cash from a friend. He didn't ask why I needed it, but I told him anyway — not because I've outrun my shame, but because I've learned to value what I once feared and to fear what I once valued. For a few minutes, we talked about the money. Then we talked about more important things.
Joshua Hunt is a writer and a former Tokyo-based correspondent for Reuters. He is now writing a book about counterfeit fashion and luxury goods.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Joshua Hunt
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