2024-04-27

Why Do I Lie to Doctors?

Her

This time I told myself it'll be different. I'll come with zero pretensions and with nothing to hide. I'll pour my heart out. It'll be hard, I told myself, but I must do it. I must strip naked, remove all the fake narratives and false excuses and just present my "true self", as broken and pathetic and disgusting as it may be. I knew I didn't want to do it because I was afraid of what I will find. I was never able to gaze at it with clarity for too long, but from what I could tell, at my deepest core, I am an evil, selfish and very petty person. I crave attention. I crave admiration. I reason why I "loved" my ex is that I loved how she seemed to worship me. I loved that she was good looking – not because I appreciated that myself, but simply because I enjoyed walking around town with her. She was like a pretty accessory I could wear, something to show off.

"Look everyone! Look what a hot babe I managed to snatch up. I have sex with that ass! I get to kiss that pretty face! I regularly grope her tits!"

This is why I loved doing PDA with her. It was such an ego boost. I loved that smug feeling so much. There were occasions when we'd meet up with pathetic virgins and autists, and I loved nothing more than to dab on them. To give them fake relationship advice that I knew full well is complete and utter horseshit.

But… There was more to it. At a certain point that wasn't it anymore. I didn't need to kiss or hug her in public anymore. I was perfectly content to just be with her. I wanted to cuddle when we were sitting in the train together, yes, but that was simply because I loved being in physical contact with her. It didn't matter if people were or weren't watching. There was, after all, a second ulterior motive to it all: I loved that when I'm with her, the rest of the world didn't seem to matter. It relieved my anxiety, and gave me a solid stone to lean against. A place to retreat to when my endless flailing about got out of control.

One of the many fond memories I have of my time with her was when we were sitting in the backseat of a coach bus. It was a beautiful spring late morning, and the roads were clear, and the bus just kept going without stops for almost an hour. There was nobody else there. Just me and her, and it was so relaxing. I lied there on her lap for the entire time. It was just me and her against the rest of the world.

So which is it? Was I psychopath/narcissist who just enjoyed the free and boundless attention she was providing me, or did I actually love her? I genuinely don't know. I don't remember. My memories of the entire period are so jumbled and confused. Trying to look back at my state of mind at the time, to understand my own feelings and motivations – and it feels like trying to get inside the head of a complete stranger. Who was that man? Why did he do what he did? It feels so odd to think back to that feeling of being in love, because it's completely alien to me now. The last time I got a reminder of that fuzzy feeling was maybe 4 months ago, and that too was just a quick flash as I was reminded of her in a weird moment of coming down from being stoned.

I don't miss her. The other week, as I was searching for something to masturbate to, I remembered how immediately after the breakup I used to enjoy just masturbating over memories of her, or over fantasies of her coming back to me. To try and recreate that feeling I went over all our old text messages, looking for photographs of her. It was a dumb decision, for sure, but to my surprise it did not send me down another spiral of reminiscence, regret and yearning. Quite the opposite. I avoided reading too many text messages, fearing the sort of overwhelming nostalgia that would hurt me, but the few short conversations I did end up reading only made me sick and disgusted. It was all so fake. So wrong. She was obviously so annoying, childish and needy. And then I saw my own messages – playing along with her stupidity, pretending to enjoy her 'unique' sense of humor. I've been engulfed by questions of identity for so long, and yet I know one thing for sure: The person I contorted myself into to try and appease her was definitely, 100% not me.

It was just lies, lies, lies. All the way down. And for what, exactly? If I genuinely loved her, then what exactly did I find appealing in her? She directly asked me that question multiple times, and every single time I couldn't come up with a proper answer. I made up bold-faced lies about her being a "good person" despite her being nothing but a callous and hateful liar. I refuse to show any sort of sympathy for anyone who's been "hurt" by a BPD ex, including myself. We all deserve it. We knew what we're going into, and we knew exactly what is happening. Yet we all played along.

Me

So why do I lie to therapists? Well, the 'sympathetic' answer might be just that: I'm afraid of digging up my innermost thoughts because I'm afraid of what I'll find down there. To verbalize my self-centered, manipulative, destructive and pestilent nature to someone IRL would be to give credence to these thoughts, when it's a side of myself I've been trying to suppress.

But why am I trying to suppress it? Because I want to be seen as a "good person" by others. Again, even my good instincts are mired in bad motivations. I want to be seen as a "good person" because the world is a bad place, and I always want to be different. Special. Unique. Above-it-all. I'm a self-righteous busybody, a devil who's turned on himself. A wolf in sheep's clothing, trying to join the flock and feed on grass. Or worse – a sick sheep that's deluded itself that it's secretly a wolf.

But none of this is new. I know exactly what is going on. Why can't I verbalize this very self-awareness to the doctors? Well, thing is – I tried! But my mind is a slippery thing. My thoughts cannot be cornered, and daylight cannot be allowed to breach into the darkness of my heart. Even if I try, my sick mind will shift and turn and switch gears. My "true self" will retreat to some other position, as it turns the old attitudes, identity and motivations into yet another front. Another mask. Another fake persona, the one I'll be using for my meetings with the doctors.

Every time I tried to open up, I technically succeeded. I would perfectly articulate every detail of what's on my mind at the moment. And yet, as soon as I'm done speaking, everything I'd just described has turned into falsehood. Despite being true just hours/minutes/moments ago, my entire psychic landscape shifts to avoid being exposed, making it all retroactively fake and false. I simply cannot escape.

I think such repeated assaults on my self-conception are a key part of what's been happening to me these past few months. Maybe it's the reason why I feel so spiritually drained. I've been forcing my psyche to shift and change through endless attempts at "opening up" and unrelenting self-introspection. I keep going "meta" about my own mind, which is simply impossible – any attempt at examining one's own thoughts from an outsider's perspective is obviously doomed to fail. But despite the fruitlessness of the endeavor, I do think it's a good exercise. If nothing else, it tires out the circuits in my brain that are responsible for the constant self-doubt and self-criticism.

I'm not always trying to understand myself. I'm not preoccupied with these attempts to gauge my own identity, and when I'm not doing it, I find myself increasingly free. My overworked superego quiets down, and my feelings and actions enter into better alignment. I act how I want to act, instead of how I'm being expected to act, by myself or by society. I care less about how I'll be seen by others, and this state of being – what one might call "mindfulness" (as much as I despise the word) – it's liberating.

But it has its disadvantages. I find that I no longer reflect on my past as much as I once did. My memory becomes a broken kaleidoscope of fragmentary events, with no associated thoughts or feelings. I very much struggle to remember what I said during conversation, which is especially scary to a habitual liar like me. Part of it might be the fact that I actively try not to lie anymore, which makes keeping tabs on what I said to this or that person mostly unnecessary. Again, liberation.

There's something I still fear, though. I fear that all this 'progress' is nothing but a deadly combination of suppression and denial. That the emotions that I pretend to have vanquished are simply bottled up somewhere. That one day, it'll all come flooding back at me, all at once.

Well, despite repeated bouts of binge drinking and heavy smoking, this hasn't happened yet. If anything, my soul becomes even sharper when I'm not sober. It's an odd feeling. A new one. On the one hand, I feel freer than ever, especially when drunk. I dance and I sing and I have fun. And on the other hand, I can't let go of my emotions like I once could, to love and to cry and to contemplate suicide. I'm not happy, but I don't think I'm depressed either. I wish I could understand what is happening to me.