Everybody Lies

One of today's prompts from The Scintilla Project:  A: What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told? Why? Would you tell the truth now, if you could?

Anybody who tells you they never lie is lying to you and to themselves.  That's the truth.  We all lie and we all do it all the time.  We lie to ourselves, our boss, our family, our friends, our lovers, even total strangers.

I like to believe that I'm a reasonably truthful person and that's true most of the time but I also know I've told lots of lies in my lifetime - some of them tiny, some of them with good intentions, some of them deliberate, some of them by accident, some when I was young and didn't know any better, some because it was just easier to lie than to tell the truth, some just for fun. 

I don't know that I've ever told a "big" lie.  I've never pretended to be pregnant to get a guy to marry me. I've never told anyone I have a terminal disease to get people to realize how much they'd miss me if I were gone.  I've never lied about where I was in order to give myself an alibi for the time I dressed up in a disguise and robbed a bank to get money to feed my gambling habit.  Then again, I'm not a character in a soap opera. 

Does it make me a better person knowing that none of the lies I've told have been really big ones? No.  Ho do you define a "big" lie?  Maybe it was just a little white lie to me but a huge lie to the person I told it to and I just didn't realize it, then or now.  Do I feel bad about telling the lies I have? Yes in some cases, no in others.  Does telling a lie make me human? Yes.

I tell the truth when I can.  It's just easier that way. I've learned the hard way that it's a lot of work to live a lie, to remember the lies you've told so you can avoid getting caught out.  As Mark Twain said, "if you tell the truth, you don't have anything to remember." 

I've learned how to tell when other people are lying but I'm not always successful at it.  I've had to forgive people who have lied to me.  In some cases, I've told them I forgave them but I was really lying. I know that a lie can be painful but the truth hurts sometimes too.  Then again, I've seen how some lies can eat away at your soul and slowly poison every aspect of your life.

I could promise to always tell the truth from now on but I can't, because it would be a lie.