“Just be yourself!” “Be true to who you are.” “Be honest with yourself.” These common self-esteem platitudes may sound simple, but they can be surprisingly difficult if you’re just beginning your self-care journey and are also a compulsive liar. Living your truth is a great way to jumpstart your path toward being a more whole person. Still, it can be a challenge if you are deeply uncomfortable with who you are, especially if “who you are” is “someone who gets a real kick out of spreading lies with reckless abandon.” Here’s how to live your most authentic truth while remaining completely dishonest when you feel like it:
Let Your Feelings Unfold With the Help of Tiny Mistruths
Acknowledge your emotions. Happiness is there, and so is sadness—for one can not exist without the other; a true yin and yang. You saw Inside Out, right? It’s like that. Allowing your emotions to be what they are is a bittersweet process, so to give yourself a reward, make something up while talking to new acquaintances. Something like, “I skipped the third grade” is an untraceable fact no one will care enough to find out and is true to your current emotion of pride. What a rush!
Identify Your Long-Term Goals and Pretend They Already Happened
To live fully, you must be honest with yourself and your desires. If you have always wanted to learn to surf, give yourself permission to start! Do some research on equipment, lessons, and good beaches nearby. However, don’t admit to anyone that you’re “thinking about starting to surf,” because that sounds like you’ll never actually get around to it. Instead, when you get into work on Monday, tell everyone about how you rode a 20-foot wave to escape a shark. Whoa, cool!
Make Peace With Your Appearance, Then Make Up Stories About It
We can be so vulnerable when it comes to our appearance, but once you accept yourself for who you are on the outside, it’s be much easier for who you are on the inside to lie about it. For example: You dye your hair blonde—and that’s okay! There’s nothing wrong with people knowing that your hair color isn’t real. But, tell people you’re a natural redhead—how rare and unique! Hair is especially fascinating and relatable because almost everyone has had some at one point.
Assume a New Identity
There comes a point in living one’s truth in which you realize there are things about yourself you hate, which you feel like you could never accept or change. In this case, it’s best to start over in another state. Let’s say you’re naturally shy. Start speaking up more and leave that all behind! Then, leave everything and everyone behind. Don’t tell them where you’re going because a lie by omission is still a lie, and that is FUN!
Pretty soon, you will be really living with the cold hard reality of yourself, but you’ll have a pretty good web of deceit going just to make the whole thing worth it. So live your best life now—turn those sads into happies and start lying for fun in 2016!
