How to Succeed at Lying Without Really Trying

I don’t ever really mean to lie. I promise.

Okay, so maybe that was a lie in itself. But I definitely know that it’s wrong to lie. Why do people lie sometimes anyway? You know the lies I’m talking about. Not the ones that have a very specific, almost desperate purpose, like denying cheating on a test or hiding the fact that you just stole half of your cousin’s Halloween candy even though she’s only six years old and you are 22 and can definitely just buy your own damn chocolate. No, I’m talking about the lies that leak out of you in low-stress environments, the lies that happen for no clear reason at all, the lies that are entirely unnecessary and yet still keep happening for some strange, godforsaken reason. My mother, as most mothers do, instilled the importance of honesty in me from a tender age. Although perhaps not always in a tender way. And yet, whenever I do happen to slip into falsehoods, I never really think of it as lying. Rather, becoming. I am an author simply telling a story, and those listening simply don’t realize that they’ve picked up a fantasy novel rather than a memoir.

The first time I lied and became someone else it was—and I swear this is the truth— entirely an accident. It was my first day as a camp counselor for Flying Horse Farms, a summer camp dedicated towards serving children with cancer. I was admittedly quite nervous. Despite my passion for serving these kids, I couldn’t help but feel stage-fright at the thought of being their mentor for the entire week. What if I’m not cool enough for them? On the first day of camp one of the campers waddled over to me with chubby cheeks and grubby hands: the entire toddler package. As he looked up at me with wide eyes, he immediately proceeded with the rapid-fire interrogation only 5-year-olds and professional CIA operatives have mastered.

“What’s your name? Are you a grown-up? My mommy and daddy are grown-ups too, do you know them? How old are you? Is this week going to be fun? I always have a lot of fun playing baseball, do you know what baseball is? Do you pee your pants at night too?”

Befuddled, I pointedly ignored the last question and instead decided to focus on the first. Should be easy enough, right? And yet, I panicked. I didn’t want to be Srikar in front of these kids. What if Srikar wasn’t fun enough?

“Stanley,” I blurted, without thinking.

Wait. Stanley? That’s not my name.

Too late. The kid had already waddled off. And so, for the rest of the week I was Stanley “Almost a grown-up” Duncan, camp counselor of the Red Unit. And Stanley was a damn good camp counselor. Stanley got ice cream for all of the kids and jumped in the deep end with a huge CANNONBALL!! to the glee of his campers. None of the kids ever batted an eye when the other counselors called me by my real name; they were too engrossed in this one persona that I had become.

Usually when I become someone else, it’s never in a high-stakes situation. Where’s the fun in lying when there are actual consequences for your actions? It always works best at massive parties filled with drunk faces I’ll never see again, or whenever I happen to interact with a stranger on the street. Quick, casual moments when I’m too lazy to really be myself. Who knew that constructing a fake identity was less work than presenting your real one? There’s something unburdening about not having to work about being your true self. Becoming just slips out of me without thought, much like responding with “thanks, you too” after the McDonalds drive-thru worker tells you to enjoy your meal. One moment your brain takes over in autopilot as you are unsure of how to deal with a perfectly not-stressful scenario, the next you are left to wonder why the fuck did I just say that?

The first and most important step of becoming is to come up with a name. Not just a name per se, but also an identity, a persona, a backstory, a set of morals that defines you. All in just a few seconds. The moment you are approached by someone new at a party or you are waiting in line for a cup of coffee and a stranger wants to chat, you must be fully in character from the first syllable that leaves your lips.

I’m Lee. Went to Georgetown. Family is from Greenwich, Connecticut. Old money, the kind where I went to brunch since I was five years old and host dinner parties that aren’t actually about the food. So you got to give off a real preppy, almost snobby kind of vibe, like someone just stuck a smelly fish under your nose. No, that won’t do, the clothes I’m wearing right now aren’t nearly nice enough. Fine. I’m Lee. UCLA graduate (my beard is grown out far enough to look 23), played volleyball in high school, golden boy of the family. It’s important to nail the Cali vibes, a kind of relaxed, casual fit like you live on the beach and you have a 4.0 GPA without even studying. Supreme confidence. That’s our persona. We can work from there.

Becoming is like breathing. If you think about it too much, you start getting in your own head and wondering how you even do it in the first place. You have to feel your way through it purely by instinct, and tailor who you have to become as the conversation continues.

My two favorite places to become someone else are Uber car rides and barbershops.

Short-lived interactions, relatively inconsequential, yet incredibly fun because no one loves to learn more about you in a quicker amount of time than drivers or hairstylists. It’s their speedy questioning that really allows you to become an expert in crafting entire life anecdotes from the unexpected. Once on a 5 AM Uber ride to the TF Green airport, I had a driver with an incessant chattiness level that was inappropriate for the absurdly early hour. Over the course of the twenty-minute ride I became a burgeoning stand-up comedian who was off to New York to run a couple gigs for the weekend. I can’t tell jokes for shit, but the driver didn’t seem to notice.

It’s always a problem when you have to meet someone multiple times after becoming someone else. As I said, lying’s only fun when there aren’t any consequences. To this day, I have to remember that at my local barbershop back in Akron, I’m Jay who goes to Ohio State when it’s Denise working, but Fabio who has his own online start-up if it’s Eric cutting my hair. When I first started becoming, I would run into problems with so many co-existing versions of myself. Not anymore. The trick to remember is that you aren’t yourself—Jay is Jay and Fabio is Fabio, and neither of them are Srikar. Now, even when I make an identity mistake, I just seamlessly chalk it up to an entirely new persona.

Lately I’ve been wondering why I take part in this mostly harmless, yet somewhat morally compromising pastime. Again, I swear, I don’t really try to. It started like how I imagine most people start lying: to protect myself. Growing up with an incredibly shy personality made it hard to reach out to new people and put my personality out there, so I didn’t. I simply put out someone else’s personality instead. Whenever I became Stanley, or Lee, or Jay, I felt as if there was an extra blanket of protection between me and the harsh blizzard of the real world seeking to delve into and expose my every flaw while leaving me frozen in the cold. Over time, I began to gradually inject more and more of my own being into each persona, until one day, I didn’t have to become anymore. To be frank, I’m not sure if I actually stopped, or if all of my personas simply merged into myself. Nevertheless, I attribute my little lying escapades as the reason why I, as my real self, have become much more comfortable with talking to others and engaging in social environments. I no longer have to become. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I still don’t want to.

Nowadays, I don’t feel the need to protect myself or to hide. I choose to become someone else to escape from myself for a little bit, to pass the time when I’m bored, or just because I want to have some fun. After spending so much time with my own personality in a single burnt-caramel skin, it’s nice to be able to be someone new from time to time. It’s a chance to explore all the people that I could have been in life but chose not to, and live in a multitude of alternate realities, even if only for a few moments.

The last step of becoming is learning how to stop and return to yourself. How to keep what happens to Stanley Duncan isolated in Stanley’s life, and not Srikar’s. When I was younger, I made the mistake of letting my identities bleed all over my life, staining the whole thing red. I told the whole class in fifth grade that I was born in Pittsburgh to explain the fact that I loved the Steelers. In reality, I’ve always lived in Akron, Ohio. I kept up the charade all the way through freshman year in college, to the point that some of my closest friends to this day believe that I’m a Pennsylvania native. I started genuinely forgetting where the falsehoods were in my personal life. Where do I end and another version of me begin? Is something still a lie if everyone in the world believes in it? After enough time, you start to believe it too.

I think those are the best lies of all.

And who knows, maybe this whole piece was a lie and I’ve never actually become anyone else at all. If so, don’t be mad. I promise I didn’t mean to.