I have a friend who’s a 16-year-old girl that cannot stop lying. Now, she doesn’t endorse lying that hurts anyone or causes harm to situations… That being said, she kinda gets a kick out of it. She describes it as an insane thrill. First, it’s like first coming up with the lie and then telling it, and the best part is creating a background story to support the lie she says. 

She can go on and on in a lie when she’s really feeling creative and I know this because one time I caught her 5 minutes into a lie she was telling about her past dog that ran away. My first thought was; “Why would you lie about something so mundane?” Now she told me this story that happened a couple of weeks ago and it was just too funny not to pass along. 

 The other day she was sitting in Spanish and they were doing this activity that was supposed to be a play on the show Jeopardy, which is one of her family’s favorite shows. Her table was talking about the show and the new host and whatnot, and she decided to blurt; “oh yeah my grandpa was on Jeopardy”. If you don’t know Jeopardy, it’s one of the hardest quiz game shows to get on because you have to know an astronomical amount of stuff that you’re never going to use anywhere else but this show. So everyone at her table, falling for her devious lie goes “oh my god really??” and “that’s so cool!!” and she’s just sitting there like yep, he was on season 4, and he was standing on the left side of the podium where he wrote his name in cursive. But there was one mischevious guy who didn’t believe it. For context, she doesn’t know this guy, spoken to him maybe once, and he is just so skeptical of my friend’s integrity which I don’t know if that’s this guy’s issue or my friend’s issue. Anyways, he starts to grill her with questions like “How much money did he make by the end?” and “Who did he play against?”.  Obviously, she was a bit stunned, like who does this guy think he is to not trust my word?? She played it off pretty cool and made up some names, and made up a number because he wasn’t gonna know if it was true or not. 

I think that her main takeaways from this event were that 1. Mr.man has trust issues 2. To be a good liar, you have to think on your feet, be quick-witted, and gaslight the other person. Someone is so much less likely to think you’re lying if they think that you think that they’re lying. I hope that makes sense. I also learned that lying in articles is easier than I thought….