Lies We Tell Ourselves

~ Gottfried

You can fool yourself, you know. You’d think it’s impossible, but it turns out it’s the easiest thing of all. If you lie to yourself, you’re being delusional. If you cannot accept the truth and think to yourself otherwise, you’re in self-denial. Now look, if you repeat a lie you said to yourself to someone else, you’re a pathological liar. You know you are lying to yourself when you deny your passions and fail to pursue what excites you, regardless of what it is. This is a denial of your highest being and your truest self.

Five more minutes. You lie to yourself when you neglect to take care of yourself. You know you could have slept a lot earlier and all this wouldn’t be happening. But you chose binge-watching la casa de papel over precious, precious sleep. Now, look at you! In trying to catch five more minutes’ sleep, you have afforded the devil the opportunity to work his magic. God loves us, but the devil takes an interest. And sometimes, a deal with the devil is better than no deal at all.

They’ll pay the money they’re owing me. Well, first of all, I would like to say sorry to you. That money isn’t coming. If your company has owed you for three months straight, I think it’s time to cut your losses and sit your arse at home. If you really believe that a corporation will pay all the arrears owed in one month, then you must also believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. If you’ve owed a sibling thrice, you go into the fourth debt with a renewed confidence. Odeshi

The secret to financial freedom is to increase my savings while tracking my spending. It all starts at the beginning of the month. Just after salary week. You throw wads of cash into your piggy bank.

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Doing your best to keep the same energy.

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At this point, you’re barely hanging on.

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You’ve endured all month. All that’s left is a trigger for you to start spending! After all, you’ve earned it.

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Back to square one. You can’t be saving peanuts and expect to be financially free. That’s wishful thinking. The answer is to increase your income! Anything else is Shalaye

I’m not afraid of the dark. But as soon as the lights go out, you start running. How convenient. The thing about darkness is that people don’t wait around to make sense of it. While at the university, the school made a law that boys and girls weren’t allowed to hang out together late at night. I knew there would be defaulters as the case is with any law.

So I decided to do something mischievous. On this day, I took my 1000W LED flashlight and went to the known hotspots. Before long I found a mark. I illuminated the unsuspecting couple going at it in the darkness and shouted:

Hey you, what are you doing there?

Without warning, they both took off, and I chased after them. They had covered quite some distance after which I stopped chasing and burst into fits of laughter. Best day ever!

I’m not scared of dying. I too am guilty of this one. I always think I’m prepared for the worst until the worst happens. This one time I’m in church and we’re singing a hymn that says…

Cast all your cares on him, for he cares for you

As we raise our voices to render the chorus, we suddenly hear a loud bang! Half the ushers flee from the premises and the instrumentalists stop playing! As I watch on, scared, I catch the pastor trying to will his legs to stop shaking. If I was the pastor, it’d take an additional twenty members to beg me out of the hole I’d have dug and hidden in.

My clothes aren’t all that dirty. You tell yourself this as you continue to pile up items of clothing on that chair that represents clothes that are…

dirty but can still be worn one last time

You keep up with this act till you look into your underwear box and you’re down to your last boxer. Congratulations, you played yourself. By the time you bring yourself to wash all those clothes, the pile alone can scare a blind man. Rather than wait for them to pile up, create a schedule so you don’t end up going to work naked on a Thursday!

I’m not fat. If anything, I just put on some weight and it fits me. Here’s how you know you’re betraying yourself. If you ever pass by a mirror and involuntarily suck in your tummy, then I’ve got news for you. It’s time to hit the gym! Also, I must say, going to the gym wouldn’t lead to drastic weight loss. You go to the gym to build muscle, not lose weight. If you really, really want to lose some weight. Go to a mental health facility and shout…

I’m not mad Oh!

Be a visionary. The visionary lies to themself, the liar, only to others. I lie to myself all the time. Sometimes as a coping mechanism, other times to delay thinking about the inevitable. The only issue with lying to myself is, I never believe me. Reality denied always comes back to haunt. There are two ways to be fooled, people! One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. In all, the best lies about me…

…are the ones I told

© Gottfried. All rights reserved.

216 thoughts on “Lies We Tell Ourselves”

  1. Sometime the lies that others tell you become the lies your mind tells you. At some point those lies become the truth because they’ve taken on the power of truth. I wish I understood that when i was receiving those lies and internalizing them. The greatest lie I ever told myself is “maybe they’re right.” The second greatest lie, after the first lie, became “I KNOW I’m right.”

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      1. Very true. But when you’re young you don’t know any better. You are raised not to judge people unfairly, not to be needlessly cruel, to conduct yourself with some decorum no matter how much you dislike someone. Since this is drilled into you from conception until adulthood, you assume that everyone else is given that message. Even if they are, there are those that travel this life almost in search of someone to harm. Stocks and stones can break my bones, but words can overwrite me. And that’s the problem. When their cruelty, their insecurities, their mess gets tossed at you, and you don’t understand it. Then others join in for whatever reason. You can be raised to not care, but no one can raise their child to not lock it away as a voice in their head. No one can protect their child from being trampled under the cloven hooves of school-yard bullies. Honestly, for me, it was never the overt bullies, I didn’t care. If you wanted to pick on my weight, my glasses, my hair…if you wanted to beat the hell out of me… I didn’t care. I could defend myself. I wore glasses so I could see the bullshit you’re slinging. I had bad hair because everyone in my family had their hair done by the same aunt who made it the easiest it could be for our moms to style it without taking forever. I was chubby because my whole family was chubby and we liked to eat. You want to punch me, go ahead, I’ve been taught by my cousins to take a lunch and lunch back three times as hard, so try me. It was always the smaller things when it came to peers. BFFs on Monday, Tuesday backstabbing, Wednesday apologizing day, Thursday distant day, Friday backstabbing day, Saturday and Sunday agonizing over why my BFF turned on me. Or worse, TEACHERS who made me feel less-than. Teachers who said that a poem I wrote involving the Pearly Gates for my Catholic aunt who passed away was “garbage” and “not worth the paper I wrote it on,” but later saying it was amazing when a classmate actually put her name on it as a test and showed the same teacher for advice. A teacher who took it from my notebook without permission and refused to return it until after lunch so she could make it bleed with red pen. That kind of cruelty is innate to some people (who should never teach), and as a 6th grader who’s aunt died suddenly three days before, it was a crushing blow. I used to write poetry all the time to cope. One year with her as a teacher, and I almost stopped writing poems altogether, even though I never submitted any because they weren’t for her or anyone but me. Having to hide your poems in your locker for fear they’d be seen. Hiding who I was for fear id be judged. Eventually, that fear becomes truth. “I write a lot of poetry, but it’s all crap,” or “I’m not smart enough to understand math,” or whatever. It becomes part of who we are. Whether or not the original person was jumping to conclusions or not. Whether or not the other person was just venting because they got into a fight with their husband that morning. It becomes part of who we are. No different than if you grew up in a home where you’re told you’re worthless everyday and carry that into adulthood. It’s all the same. Big or little, they all become true with time.

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          1. Hurt comes in many forms. I have found that for me, the pain of bruises fade, and are not anything more than funny anecdotes. No matter how hard the beating, there is an easy way to win: get up. Always get up, and they lose. 6 men v one woman. JUST GET UP, and you have won, especially if the beg you to stay down. But with psychological and mental messages, they last forever.

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