Opinion | Growing Up Poor Made Me a Liar

If something changed inside me that day, I didn’t feel it. But my behavior did change. Like many poor people, we were subject to the uncertainty and chaos that comes with a lifetime of bad jobs and worse landlords, and we moved often. The next time we moved, I was careful not to let any of my friends find out where I lived. When someone else’s parents took me home from a sleepover or sporting event, I’d give them directions to a nicer house in a nicer neighborhood, then walk home after they drove away. Sometimes many miles. Instead of a string of low-wage jobs, my mother had a career, and instead of alcoholism my stepdad had health problems.

My fear of being seen for who I really was grew so strong that it became almost limbic — once, while walking home from the grocery store, I broke into a full sprint to avoid a friend who called out to me from down the street. It was pure instinct, like an animal sensing a predator, and when my friend asked about it the next day, it took an elaborate string of lies to convince him I hadn’t lost my mind. The fact that I was losing my mind somehow never occurred to me.

At every new school, and in every new town, I laid down whatever inventions I’d been living with since the last time we moved. The first lie was always about something meaningless, like being good at some video game I’d never actually played. It might impress someone, or it might just move the conversation forward. Most of my lies were so inconsequential that they probably never even registered with the people hearing them. But for me they became more false biography to internalize. Instead of the person I was, or even the person I wanted to be, I moved through the world as the person my lies made me.

My facility with the lies of survival informed my more self-serving lies, imbuing them with the texture of a method actor’s performance; I spun lies from truth with such skill that I sometimes lost track of which was which. Living with lies is much easier if you can manage to keep them simple. Selling them, on the other hand, requires an ability to conjure the details that make real experiences memorable: Even the most skeptical friend will believe you saw the hottest concert of the summer if your story focuses on the misery of spending the day crushed against a security barricade. No lie was too big or too small, so long as it helped me project an aura of ordinariness.

Lying as a means of coping with poverty had given way to something more pathological. Instead of easing my passage through reality, lying had become a way of denying it altogether. To the extent that lying can become a game, its goals share something in common with gambling: It escalates not because people are hard to fool but because they are so easily fooled that experienced liars grow bored with their habit. The stakes of the gamble, eventually, become life and death; once caught, the person you created evaporates, leaving behind a vapor trail to vex those who thought they knew you. The end game, and perhaps the impulse itself, is as much about self-destruction as self-delusion.

When I left home at the age of 17, the stakes of this game moved beyond the realm of the psyche. With barely enough money for a bus ticket to Los Angeles, where an acquaintance had offered me an internship and a shot at a mailroom job at a small record company, I talked a complete stranger into letting me live in her guest room free until the paychecks started coming. But the paying job never materialized, so I persuaded a friend to wire me enough money for a bus ticket to Oregon; while fleeing under cover of night, I was caught by the kind homeowner, but convinced her I was only heading to the laundromat after a bout of insomnia. A few months later, I pulled the same stunt with two high school classmates, whose years of friendship earned them a brief note of apology for my sudden exit. The next stop was Minnesota, where I spent weeks living as a stowaway in the dorm room of a girl I’d met online — no easy feat at the College of St. Catherine, an all-girls school, where dozens of students abetted our sinful living arrangement.