My mother kept me fairly isolated and secluded from other kids my age, so most of my social interactions growing up were observing hers with her friends. She also has narcissistic personality disorder, so she was frequently lying, cheating, and scamming people. This usually involved excessively wordy conversations, pitches, and spiels on her part, or just her dominating conversations with people to talk about herself. So I grew up thinking that this was normal way to speak to people. Learned behaviour, if you will.
It was only once I started to enter adulthood and interacted with more people, that I realised people telling me long winded stories were pretty much always lying to me, or greatly embellishing and exaggerating the truth. So I began to notice when people would start doing that, then begin to overanalyse their tone, their pitch, their vocal cadence, any physical ticks, or strange movements, etc.. After hanging out with someone a few times, I got pretty good at knowing exactly when they were lying and when they'd end the lie and resume the truth in their stories.
Unfortunately, this also made me extremely self-conscious when I would talk to anyone about a subject I was passionately interested in. Because there was that parallel overlap of being excessively wordy and going on and on about extraneous details and minutiae between how I was speaking and how habitual liars spoke.
Except, the difference between the two, at least for me, is that when liars are speaking that way they are trying to convince another person something untrue happened, or happened a different way, or wanting some type of sympathy, or help, or attention, or money, etc.. It's never selfless, there's always some underlying, ulterior motive.
And when I am speaking that way, I do not want or need anything from the other person. I just REALLY want to tell them resistor types and brands of the 1970s, or David Gilmour's pedal board, or obscure toys from the 1980s, or how children's cartoons changed in animation and writing styles from the 70s through the 90s, or what song uses what sampled drum break, how that break was chopped, who else used the same break.
That's not to say that I've never lied. I have, I just don't like to. And more often than not, it'll just be a white lie to put someone else's interests before my own. Like telling my girlfriend that I'm full, because I know she really wants my last slice of pizza. Even though she ate all of her half and going without my last slice would still leave me hungry. I don't really have any interest in lying for personal gain. On top of it feeling antithetical to who I am as a person, I don't have the energy to remember the unnecessary details of the lie, because lying is not interesting to me.
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ASQ : 30
RAADS-R : 123 (L:11/SR:51/SM:39/C:22)
CAT-Q : 131 (C:38/M:43/A:50)
RDOS Aspie-Quiz : 130 out of 200 (96% probability)
06 Dec 2024, 1:11 pm
