CONFESSIONS OF A CHILDHOOD LIAR| BLANKETMAGAZINE.COM | FEATURE 12.2007

We invited six writers to make a confession. We then challenged six creatives to take these confessions and interpret them into a visual piece.  

I confess, I was a compulsive liar as a child.

No I mean I really probably should have gone to the psychoanalyst for that shit. It didn’t last a ridiculous amount of time, only a couple of years and I managed to kick the habit by the time I reached about thirteen but I packed some real porky pies into those first few years. My imagination measured dangerous proportions and was mixed with an over emotionality that turned me into a completely eccentric dramatist.

I totally lied to any friend I could about any abstract thing I could pull from the whacked contortions of my mind. I didn’t lie to my teachers, I knew they were too smart and would probably punish me or make my school life some sort of line writing hell but trying it on with mum and dad was never beyond me. At the age of 9, after reflecting upon the architecture of our year three playground, I realised that it reminded me of Egypt. Instead of just discussing this observation with a friend I ran home to mum and announced “They have found out that our playground has a pyramid buried under it, along with some relics and they’re doing an archaeological dig on Monday”. Mum said “That wouldn’t be very likely sweetie, cause your playground is in Australia, not Egypt”.

Damn. I reeled. I hadn’t thought of that.

So the next time just to get the reaction of awe I required, I told mum and dad that a stranger had tried to abduct me outside the playground and had invited me into his car with lollies. It totally backfired of course cause my parents almost cried, threw me in the car and drove us all down to the pedestrian crossing in question asking me to point out exactly where his car was and what he had said. Inner monologue said “Okey dokey I thought, that was a little too intense” and thinking it’d be apropos to keep things on the lighter side I opted for fabricating new stories relating to my sister being pregnant with triplets. I also stuffed two of mum’s scarves into a crop top after the summer holidays and pretended I had developed breasts by the age of 9 and a half.

Some of my most creative lies followed themes relating to supernatural phenomena. Aliens abducting my cat over the holidays and putting a computer chip in him that crawled out of his fur and burrowed into my head while I was asleep. It took my DNA to a scientist in a lab interstate and by the holidays I was meeting my long lost twin who was part robot. Though I hadn’t seen The X Files yet, playing Mulder would have been the ultimate for me; part of a secret group who really believed... who knew about some spooky otherworldly shit that nobody else knew. This would, of course set me apart from the rest of the pack. I wanted to be extraordinary, never average and on the edge of a revolution of some sort cause I just loved playing with raw emotion, the impossible and the absurd in life. Unsurprisingly I grew out of this phase in high school, where three crazy things happened in quick succession:  1. I won an award for creative writing in English and my teacher told me I actually had an aptitude for something 2. I discovered drama class where I received consistently high marks for the entire duration of my high school life and 3. My obsession with music began and I started playing bass in my bedroom.

Fifteen years later I think I may still hold smatterings of guilt over the first ten years as I have a total aversion to drama queens and even telling a white lie throws me into a crazy moral dilemma. I am the person you ask when you really, truthfully want to know if your thighs look big in those jeans or if that poem you wrote for your lover was a too cheesy and over sentimental. Accusations such as “You’re honest to a fault!” are not uncommon for me and I’ll take that over being a lying S.O.B any day. For someone who remembers the first 10 years of her life as an insane fabrication, this is basically the ultimate compliment.

-Amanda Laver