For how long do you think you could maintain a lie, keep up a story? Especially when the person to whom you are telling this tale is someone that feels very deeply for you, feelings that are built upon the story you have told. A hour? A day? A week? More than a year?
I’m having a very strange weekend. I feel used, cheated, deceived and very hurt. I also feel stupid, naïve, gullible and foolish. I’ve broken all my own personal rules, rules I’d made as a result of hard won experience.
The thing is, now that I know the truth, I feel that a burden has been lifted from my shoulders, a burden that, as the sharp-eyed amongst you may have noticed, settled on me yesterday evening. I feel an element of freedom now, though last night was filled with anguish, sadness and even tears.
Over the last year, someone has been telling me a story. I believed the story. The story was very convincing, largely because it was clearly based on fact. But two critical elements of the story, two elements that were fundamental to the whole thing, plus a whole bunch of other parts of the story, were false. That falsehood was maintained throughout, right up until this evening, more than 15 months since the falsehoods were first uttered.
I don’t like being lied to. White lies I can excuse, though I may resent them. But out and out, brazen telling of absolute falsehoods, especially when those falsehoods have been told for personal gain or to achieve one’s own ends, make me very angry, hurt and upset. Especially when my emotions have been played with.
I’ve been lied to before. Those people are no longer on my Christmas lists, shall we say. It’s my nature to trust people that I meet until I have evidence to dissuade me from doing so. I may have to review that, and become much more circumspect.
This time, I feel no malice. Well, not much. I’m not really sure what I feel, to be honest, aside from the knee-jerk reactions I described above. At least they have had the decency to come clean, and I respect that. I certainly would have felt much more pain, sorrow and sadness if I had not known.
I need more time to think about this, to come up with a reaction. In the meantime, I’m going to the bar. As I say, it’s been a very strange weekend.