Lies on Lies on Lies

I have always prided myself on being an excellent liar; it's something that I worked on for years and years, and some would even say that it came innately. To an extent, I feel like I owe it to genealogy or maybe even my trusting blue eyes. People love to believe what I say because I guess I just appear to be someone that you can trust. It started pretty early on, and the first lie I can remember is when I almost killed my brother via glass light cover. We were sitting in our joint bedroom (in my defense, the bedroom that he kicked me out of when we were nine because he felt like he deserved his own room... I'm not bitter) playing the "throw the Play-Doh and make it hit the ceiling" game. Eventually, my obvious lack of athletic ability reared its ugly head and I smashed a giant wad of purple Play-Doh into the glass light cover. Thanks to my cat-like reflexes, I dodged the shards of glass as they rained down from above, but Casey wasn't so lucky. I'm still reminded of my indiscretions every time I see the vertical scar on his right shoulder. When my parents first stormed the room, I wanted nothing more than to tell them the truth, but like most proclamations I tried to make as a six year old, no one listened... even after the excitement was over. So in my six year old mind, I crafted a genius story: Casey threw the Play-Doh up and it hit the ceiling beside the light cover, and it must have shaken the roof enough that it knocked the light cover down... why no one ever questioned that story is still beyond me, but it wasn't until about 8 years later that the truth came out, and as Ashley Judd taught us, you can't be tried for the same crime twice.
I lied my way through most of my public school career, creating all of these elaborate yarns that I would convince people were actual [events, people, etc] in my life. I would make sure that they were interesting enough that people would listen to them, but realistic enough that people wouldn't think I was making them up. For the most part, people loved everything I had to say, and that's all that mattered. Yes, of course I have a horse. I actually have three. They live on a farm about 20 miles away, and my family goes and rides them on the weekends. Did I mention that my dad knows how to lasso? No. He can't show you. All of the lies made sense in my mind, and at times, I think I may have believed them all myself. I think that could actually be a psychological disorder, but I'm not going to take the time to look it up. I'm pretty sure I have a laundry list of other psychological disorders much more relevant to my life.
The older I got, my ability to lie became less focused on myself and more on the common good of others. My first official night as a resident assistant, two other RAs invited me to go out into the college woods with them. They had a six pack of Red Stripe, and it seemed like the most rebellious thing I could have ever done in my life. I mean, I was just a young, impressionable 19 year old, lured by the temptation of pseudo-import beer. Sadly, I was confined to the walls of my dorm because it was my "duty night." I watched them lurk into the woods with a satchel full of beer. Looking back on it, I don't know what was so charming about the situation. Like most beers, I didn't care so much to drink the Red Stripe or even be in the woods. I used a string of lies between the ages of 10-16 to avoid staying out of the woods as much as I could. I just wanted to be included in the scandalous activity of drinking two beers in the woods.
About two hours later, I got a phone call from Ellison. It was all Blair Witch Style; he was breathing heavily through the phone: Justin, we're caught. We're going to get caught. I had no idea what was going on, partly because it had the making of a cult classic that I still don't understand, partly because I had just woken up. We're trying to get back to Copeland. The dogs are coming. I have to go. Click. That was it. I sprung out of bed, contemplating what my next move would be. Eventually they escaped the dogs and made it back, sans satchel and beer. They immediately began to panic because John had left his ID in the bag. "Lie Justin" wiped the sleep from his eyes and focused up. My ultimate plan was genius: Ellison was to go back to Gamble, and John back to his room. Once the bag was found, the story was that John had left his door unlocked and bag by the door. Freshmen had broken in and stole the bag, which contained objects that we would later dispose of. Yes, John's ID was in the bag, but when he woke up, the bag was missing. Simple.
They decided instead to tell the truth, and in a surprising turn of events, Maryville PD and campus police let the entire situation go. John and Ellison went to Waffle House to celebrate their near brush with a county misdemeanor, and I just... went back to sleep. Soon after, I began to see that my desire to lie had waned. I didn't seem to be gaining much from a life of compulsive lying, no matter how airtight the lies were.
And all that leads me to now. Looking back on the past 10 months of 2012, I think this might have been my most truthful year to date... kind of. It's easy to tell the truth when you're leaving a place because you don't have to deal with the repercussions of what may happen if you stuck around. So, as I left Maryville, I came clean about a giant heap of information that I had kept quiet about for months or even years. A good deal of those things can be found within this blog. The issue that makes me question the validity of this year is "lying by omission." A decent portion of my life has consisted of lies by omission because... well, I'm a sneaky kid. Namely, I think of all the times that I skipped class in high school and just kind of drove places because I was able to check myself out when I was "sick." I think about the duty night my junior year of college that I just kind of blew off so I could go get the new Taylor Swift CD. But the lies that bother me most are the quiet lies that I've kept to myself to protect other people. As I sit in my ethics class, I find that public relations is a hard place to find a definite set of morals because you wouldn't tell a company's secrets if there's no absolute reason that you have to... but you have to wonder, what exactly would happen if you just told everything about your life without any regard for who it may affect or what repercussions may follow.
The exemptions we make for ourselves are interesting. I can't remember the last blatant lie I told, but I can't count how many lies by omission I've told. I mean, I have binders full of them. The question is: can you really say that it's a lie if you're the only one who knows it's not true?