Over the years, my alcohol addiction had all kinds of negative effects. Some of them were more obvious and visible, while others were more subtle and some times hard to detect, even for myself. There have been a lot of physical effects, which I'll probably write about as well eventually, but the worst ones actually weren't physical at all. The one effect it had that I was totally unaware of even after quitting, was that my alcohol abuse made me a notorious liar.
Now don't get me wrong. I didn't make up lies about how much I earn, what my job is, or anything like that. I didn't lie to impress other people or anything. Mostly, I just lied because I wanted to conceal how much alcohol I actually was consuming.
I really got into alcohol a bit later than most people. I didn't drink much, if at all, until the age of 19. Back then, I was still living with my parents, although I had my own appartement in their house. My parents were lovely people and they sure understood how to party, even after they had me. So they weren't opposed to having a drink every now and then and they totally wouldn't have raised an eyebrow about me having some more drinks on a night out.
For some reason I can't explain, though, I always felt like I had to hide my alcohol consumption from them. So I started to leave certain things out when talking about what I did last night. I started to tell them that I would be going to the cinema with friend A when I was actually going to a pub with friend B, and so on.
When I eventually moved out to my own appartement a few years later, I was so used to concealing that I was drinking alcohol that I did it out of habit. Now it's not that almost all of my friends didn't know that I was drinking alcohol anyway, I mean I was drinking with them after all, but I just concealed that I had been drinking with somebody else the night before or how many drinks I actually already had.
This behavior obviously isn't exactly good, but in itself it only would have been half as bad. The real issue is that I became so accustomed to telling lies that I started to do it all the time and for any random occasion. When people asked me what I did last night, I just told them something else, even if I didn't have a single drink last night. When asked what my plans are for the day, I'd just say what ever came to my mind that moment, no matter if it was the truth or not.
More often than not, the stuff I told didn't change anything for the other person. It was just one random thing replaced with another. I didn't tell that lie to improve things for me, make me more interesting or what ever, I just lied because I could and apparently, because I was pretty good at it. This went on for years and years without people actually realizing that a lot of the small random things I told them simply weren't true.
The crazy thing is, believe it or not, I wasn't aware of that myself at all until a few months after I had actually quit drinking. I can't even tell how I realized it, but it was during a phone call with a new but already really good friend. She asked me what my plans were for the weekend and before I knew what I was saying, I already had told her some random story that wasn't too bad but also not exciting at all. And I did so despite actually having pretty cool plans for the weekend that would have been a lot more interesting than what I just told her.
Thankfully, after that, the mirror shattered and I realized what I just did. It took me a few more days to really understand how deep the lying went in my personality, but the process had started and I quickly understood how crazy and bad that was for me. During that time, late summer of 2023, I was in the middle of realizing how bad alcohol had been for me and I've been working on changing a lot of things in parallel. Nevertheless, this quickly became my main focus and I tried everything I could to stop that behavior.
It might sound stupid and totally silly to anybody that's accustomed to simply telling the truth, especially if it doesn't hurt them in any way, but stopping these little random lies must have been the hardest issue I had to deal with since being sober. Having done it for almost 2 decades, it's just so engrained in me, I just can't help myself. Even today I sometimes catch myself saying something that's not exactly true even before I have the time to really think about the question.
It has gotten better, though, especially in situations were I'm writing with somebody. This is probably because I have more time to actually think about what I want to say in that instance. When going into conversations with people, especially people I care about, I often try to tell myself to only tell the truth. I still slip sometimes and I try to write it down when I told a lie and also think about how that lie came to be and what I can do to avoid it in the future.
Interestingly enough, I always considered myself to be somebody that's trying to stay close to the truth. While that was true for the bigger picture, I was totally off for day to day random conversations and it's crazy how alcohol is not only making you do these things but it's also completely blocking you from realizing what you are doing.
Anyway, writing down these stories does help me a lot personally and so I think I will continue with them for quite a while. I don't have the time to write every day and I also don't want to force myself to do anything, so I'll only do these posts whenever I have time and feel like writing it. And now, I'm going to meet a friend for dinner and spend a pleasant, truthful evening in town with her.