How to Play: Give three statements about yourself. Let two be truths and one be a lie. Make your lies rest in the space between believable and outlandish. Make them sound like something you might’ve done. Make your truths seem untrue—something out-of-the-ordinary, something uncharacteristic, something buried deep and shrouded in secrecy. Flirt with the line between truth and lie. Linger so long you become unsure of the boundaries yourself. 

Ready? I’ll go first.

#1 

The skeletons in my closet are covered in gold and lace, are strappy and see-through, are draped over hangers in the very back, hidden behind my bulky sweaters and long, puffed coats. I can wear my vice like a tight bodice under church dresses. In the same way that some waste their paychecks on alcohol or gambling or products they will hoard away and never use, my compulsive purchasing is a vice. By the time I got married at twenty-two, I had spent hundreds of dollars on lingerie. A virgin, rigidly religious and conservative, I was waiting for marriage. Nevertheless, my secret hoard grew. 

Growing up in a religion that had strict dress standards for girls, I wasn’t allowed to wear tank tops, or swimsuits that showed my stomach, or any clothing deemed “too tight” or “too sheer.” Once, I showed up to a church youth activity after soccer practice and was sent home to change out of my shorts. Once, a man at church told me a longer dress would make me more beautiful. I was taught to hide my body, to cover anything connected to desire. 

The first time I tried on lingerie, I was a church missionary and was turning twenty years old. It felt like a rite of passage, a ceremonial transition out of the innocence of the teens and into the coveted twenties. As missionaries, we adhered to a dress code of modesty—shirts that covered our shoulders and stomach and chest, skirts with hems that fell below our knees, no gaudy jewelry or bold makeup that would draw attention to ourselves—and we were not allowed to touch or even think about the opposite sex. But I often stared at mannequins draped in lingerie as we passed store windows. I wanted to know how it felt to see my body instead of hiding it. So, in a dressing room on my twentieth birthday, I set my Bible on the floor to slip into sheer black and red material. 

Later, at the age of twenty-one, I went to Victoria’s Secret with my college roommate, who was recently engaged. She was looking for wedding-night attire; I was looking for an excuse to lean into my weakness. I bought a red corset that hooked together along my spine; she bought a black babydoll that fell just below her hips. She bought hers on sale; I bought mine at full price. She bought hers for a purpose; I bought mine for self-indulgence. When we returned to our apartment that night, we laid together on the floor in our new purchases and ate warm chocolate chip cookies and stayed up laughing—about what, I don’t remember. But I remember how the structured red fabric slipped around my rib cage, how it touched me in places I had never been touched, how it held me in a way I never knew I deeply needed.

Do the lies we invent come from some kind of truth somewhere buried within us? Could that, then, make the falsities true? 

#2 

I lived for four months in an eating disorder treatment center. I slept there, ate all three meals and snacks there, got better there, wanted to die there. It’s not that I would have rather died than gain weight—it’s that they were synonyms: one and the same. 

Food was gluttonous. It made me unworthy when all I so desperately wanted was to be righteous. 

Weight gain was a representation of how evil I was, how disobedient. 

Shedding weight was like shedding sin, shedding shame. 

So, I was sent by a team of doctors to a treatment center, where every day, the care technicians set out small plastic cups filled with a gentle laxative that looked like sugar. Every night, a worker would interrupt our sleep to make sure we weren’t cutting ourselves or scratching ourselves or doing jumping jacks or sit-ups or jogging in place as punishment. After meals, we had to pull our bras away from our bodies to prove we hadn’t stuffed the padded cups with uneaten food. 

 When we refused to eat, they poured us a thick glass of a meal-replacement drink. It was a constant battle between keeping to the rules or staying thin and righteous. 

When I refused to drink the meal replacement, they slithered a thin feeding tube through my nostril, up my sinus, and then down my throat to reside in my shriveled stomach.

Few people know that I lived there. I told coworkers I was completing an internship. I told extended family I was just taking time off from school. I told friends I just needed a break—that I was burned out from trying to do so much at once. Even still, I keep those heavy nights and dragging days in the deepest cavities of my memory.

Perhaps there is some value to the fuzzy lines between true and untrue. I think the ambiguity in what we say—the possibility that it could be not true—can act as a protective layer in front of truths we are afraid to expose.

And what of partial truth? Does a thing only become a lie if it is marketed as truth?

I once had an endoscopy while fully conscious—I remember the tears that were forced from my eyes as they shoved it down my throat, the dry heaving reflexes, the fear in my body as it switched into panic and survival mode, the suffocating sensation, barely being able to breathe slow and shallow through my nose. 

The feeding tube felt worse than the endoscopy. 

#3

Last summer, when my husband and I sat in the drive-thru at a Chinese fast-food restaurant, he semi-jokingly asked me if I was bisexual, and the words I don’t know flung themselves out of my mouth automatically, involuntarily, slipping off my tongue before they even entered my brain. 

In that split second after I said it, before my husband reacted, I realized that although yes didn’t feel true, it didn’t feel wrong either. So, I was left with this in-between space to hand him.

It’s something I’ve thought of often since then, this rapid-fire I don’t know—which I realized (after his surprised response) is likely not a typical response of a definitively straight person. I think of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, the secret lesbian character on Pretty Little Liars, Katy Perry’s 2008 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” how I felt during Taylor Swift’s performance of “Vigilante Shit.” 

I think of all the ways I’m unsure. 

And I think, too, of the ways my religious community views non-straight people—how, growing up, they were often hated, were seen as threats, were told it’s just a phase—and then I am even more unsure.

I think sometimes we lie as a form of self-preservation. We shroud our truths within lies because that is the only way we can speak them. We blur the lines to keep ourselves safe. 

At least, I do. 

On that day, in our car, in that drive-thru, I took back my I don’t know and replaced it with a definitive No—a reassurance that I was still exactly who my husband–and I–thought I was. But even though I pulled the words back into my mouth and swallowed them whole and burning, they singed my throat and turned to ash in my brain. 

It’s only there that they continue to compost. 

Which are the truths? Which is the lie? 

(Why) does it matter? 

Your Turn.