I like to think I started out in life as a reasonably honest person. As a kid I was, if memory serves, about average in this regard: not a saint exactly, but not a scoundrel either.
Then I grew up, developed a drug-and-alcohol problem, and suddenly found myself having to lie all the time.
One day about a year before I entered sobriety, I was talking to a friend – an older guy who was well versed in the problems of hiding his drug usage – about my new girlfriend (now my wife).
“I feel bad,” I told this guy. “She keeps telling me I have to stop taking drugs. She never shuts up about it. I know she means well but she’s driving me crazy.”
“So you’ve been telling her when you get high?” my friend asked.
“Yeah,” I said glumly.
“Well, you just have to stop,” my friend said.
“Stop getting high?” I asked, suddenly very unhappy with where the conversation was going.
“No!” my friend said back. “Of course not. You’ve got to stop telling her what you’re doing. The thing is” – and here my friend paused to give what he was about to say the weight it deserved – “sometimes you just gotta lie to them.”
That conversation didn’t mark the beginning of my career as a regularly dishonest person (I’d already been one for quite some time.). But it did mark the moment when lying stopped being something I did automatically and quietly – almost as if it were a secret I was keeping from myself -- and started being something I did consciously, even boldly. Dishonesty, it turned out, was a kind of tool: One that, in dealing with the problems the world threw at you, you simply had to make use of. Not to use it would be like getting a flat on the freeway and refusing to take the jack out of your trunk.
From then on, when my wife-to-be fixed me with one of those sour/suspicious looks of hers and said “Are you high?” and I responded with an outraged “No!”, I did so as someone who knew fully and consciously what he was doing. As my friend had explained, some people just didn’t understand the rules of privacy – that some things are sacrosanct. Whether or not one was high was first on that list, and dishonesty was the tool I could use to defend it.
These days, of course, my thinking is somewhat different. After a year or so of embracing the ideology of conscious lying, I entered rehab and learned the very different ideology of conscious honesty.
Not that I’m 100% honest today. Far from it in fact. But I AM someone who understands that what my friend told me in that phone conversation wasn’t entirely accurate after all.
Dishonesty is, in fact, a tool – and often a very useful one. But unlike most tools, it isn’t one we can pick up and put down at will, like a chef’s mitt or a monkey-wrench. Instead it is more like a living entity -- something that, just as decisively as we grab hold of it, grabs hold of us as well.
And the uses it will choose to make of us once we are in that grasp are anybody's guess.