I used to lie a lot. I lied so much that I would lose track of them and some of the shit that I conjured up was so humiliating that the stories have motivated me to avoid people from my past entirely. I don’t lie anymore though, trust me.

Why would I lie in the first place? I took a long journey to that answer, and now I have almost self-destructive honesty. Here’s the deal: We can’t time travel into the past and fix the mistakes, but we can be better starting today. That’s all we can do, even if it feels like it isn’t enough. I went from making up stories to making stories, and it’s liberating.

When my parents died, I was 16 years old. It was the defining moment of my life, and it still has a ripple effect that can be felt in everything from my socioeconomic status to my education level. It affects how I handle emotions and relationships. I’m old and know all this now, but I wish I knew a while ago, maybe I wouldn’t have been a fuck up for so long.

As I said, I lost my parents at 16 but my mom had been sick since I was 11. I watched my mother battle a terminal illness for five years. They weren’t all bad times, mind you, she had successful brain surgery early on that added time to her life.

She used some of that time to join the Springfield Falcons, a local American Hockey League team’s booster club, which was adorable. She tried to spend a lot of that time with me, but I was in the middle of being a kid, and in retrospect, I completely detached from the situation.

For five years my household and my life were dominated by cancer. My father also became sick with lung cancer shortly after my mom, but timelines after her initial diagnosis are super fuzzy, so I don’t remember exactly when this happened. This is what people don’t understand unless they live it, you don’t just lose a parent, you watch them die.

I watched both of my parents die, and in the process, we all forgot each other in the moment. At times, my house could be the loneliest place in the World.

While all of the people my age were coming of age together, I was caring for my mom while she had a seizure or getting in the car every day immediately after school to drive to Hartford and see her in the hospital. I was exhausted, numb, and sad.

I felt such a longing to be important to anyone, to be allowed to just be a kid. I became invisible, and I became so socially inept that I couldn’t fix it.

This is where the lies start. While all my friends lived life, I stared out of a car window, imagining myself as all these things that I knew I would never be.

Good, bad, rebellious, suave, in my mind, I was somebody. These fantastic ideas would pour out of me while I was chilling with the kids who lived “normal” lives. They were doing drugs, dating, and living. I was memorizing what the wooden wall down I-91 looked like while contemplating how I got expelled for bad behavior.

I lied because I thought I was nothing, and I thought everybody bought it, even though I was frequently called out or embarrassed by being caught red-handed.

There are so many lies, and I know all my friends exchanged them like trading cards and laughed, so I just ducked out on my past life. How do you repair that? How do you come back from that? I feel too much shame to ever try, and that is why I am honest to a fault now. .

Even writing this makes my skin crawl and my cheeks turn red. I had to push a reset button and start over, which has worked out surprisingly well, thank goodness. Becoming an adult required facing and processing that previous version of myself, but the new me needed to move on from that life entirely.

Best Lies:

I can play hockey and dominated a fictional summer league

I can ice skate

I have a problem with [insert drug], feel bad for me

I have a girlfriend in [insert location] and I may or may not have had sex with her

The backflip, of course (I saw this kid Justin do one off of the steps of our troublemaker school and decided I did it)

There are others, countless others, but I’m not about to rehash my stupidity here, as I stated previously, I ditched that version of myself. What I will say is that lying can come from a weird dark place. When you feel, and in many ways, if you are an isolated cancer kid you are, insignificant to everybody around you, having stories of how amazing you are when nobody is around is a shield. It’s so humiliating though that it’s like carrying a shield with crudely drawn penises all over the thing.

As I said, I made experiences for myself once I hit my 30s. My wife has helped facilitate this in many ways, and thanks to her, we have seen and done so much. I even saw the paste eater’s grave in Goldfield, Nevada! Furthermore, she lets me spread my wings and create individual experiences. I may even go abroad at some point, and she is supportive. I mean something to somebody and now that I have self-worth, I can’t believe myself. Just terrible.

The good news is that I always tell the truth now, or do I? I’m like the Paul Heyman of blogging over here but don’t worry, you can definitely trust me.