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Thoughts of the Untrue
It’s the silence that faces me every night when I go to sleep that I no longer can take. I’m just sixteen and here I am, forced to tackle different phases of emotion, strive for acceptance, and endure criticism both from others and from myself. Every time I take hold of my pillow, lay my body flat on the slightly comforting mattress, at this moment flashes of events of my day race through my mind reminding me of the loneliness that I go through every single day.
I encounter the pains of reality that makes me different from my peers. I feel alienated by circumstances of life that the distinction of me from my friends makes me feel insignificant. I seek recognition. I feel that recognition may soon lead to acceptance, even though I know my friends all ready like me for who I am. But who am I?
I have successfully built this image of me for my companions to believe is the real me. Yes, I lie. What for? That I have asked myself over and over, until I no longer answered my way out of this mess.
I think it started when I was very young, simple lies from an innocent child thinking that playing a trick on his mom is funny. Then I went to school, a stage in life that molds a kid’s personality aside from the parents nurturing. Going to a private school sets boundaries in the social castes. As for me, coming from a middle class family makes me one of the “poor” students compared to my batch mates. Therefore I am pressed by the demand of staying “sociable” to make up stories that would not incriminate me into being an “untouchable”.
Merely by twisting fact into fiction, I have created a world entirely different from the truth, as if trying to escape the harshness of reality. Have you ever tried to escape some kinds of conversations because you know that answering truthfully would definitely be social suicide? Well for a 10 year old child in my situation, these were it. Grabe, tignan mo itong power ranger robot ko, ikaw meron ka ba nito? Hoy, meron ka bang tamagochi? Hey, we’re catching a movie kaya lang kkb, sama ka, or simply this one, when I was in the sixth grade. Shoot, ‘la na ko load, hey pa-text naman o.
My string of lies soon became a web. And soon I lost all the signs of innocence, no more stuttering and sudden break of sweat. I was already what others would call a “professional liar”. I have created a life that was not mine. And I couldn’t take the burden placed upon me by myself and my conscience.
And later in high school I made myself very confident, a defense mechanism by means of lying. Yes, I lie.
Lying gave me a world for me to live in, but there was one problem, I had no one else to live with. Not saying the truth is not opening yourself with others, and they could never understand who you truly are. You run from your problems but the catch is when you start running, you never stop. You watch your whole childhood pass you by, and your innocence fly away. And every night when you lay your body flat on the slightly comforting mattress, when you are all alone and there is no one to lie to, and then you face yourself, the truth, the pain. Only then that innocence catches up with you, the child you tried so hard to hide is set free, and the only thing the child does is the only thing left to do. You cry.
