betrayski

I had a seemingly innocent conversation in the recent past. In that conversation, there ended up to be details divulged about persons and activities that I hadn't the faintest idea were ever in question. I now feel like shit.

This is not a situation where I accidentally opened my mouth and spilled the beans about something that was known to be a secret betwixt someone else and me. It was a series of stories and lies that I had no idea were ever told and I unknowingly set the record straight. My question here is, did I betray the person from whom the fabrication spurted?

"What??? You mean she isn't the financial advisor for an entire industrialized nation, working from her livingroom?"

"You mean to tell me that all this time that we were married and had a family, he had a parallel life in Nebraska? Where did he find the time?"

It's these types of questions we would all like to avoid, as both the asker and the interrogated. It's these types of situations I would like to avoid having to accidentally generate. Call me crazy, but dealing with people after they have been lied to, is not fun. Not fun at all.

I am a huge proponent of the truth. Telling the truth and hearing the truth are big with me and when I find out I've been lied to, I react very poorly. Lying steals another person's right to the truth and to their feelings about the situation. Lying also almost always turns out to have been a colossal waste of time as well, as the truth pretty much always comes out eventually, and the damage done by lying is frequently irreparable. Trust is severed, often never to be rebuilt and the liar is then heaped upon with guilt and remorse, and spends large amounts of time wondering why he or she fabricated to begin with.

But I digress. What I'm faced with now, is the burden of having planted not just seeds, but forests of doubt within the person I accidentally educated and I have also technically betrayed the trust of someone I never would have knowingly exposed. Truth be told though, I'm glad I was never actually put in a position to try and knowingly uphold such an obnoxious series of untruths, because I don't think I could have done it. Does that make me a bad person?

Let this be a lesson to yus; tell the truth all the time. You may be in a sticky situation for a minute, but it's better to deal with it in real time than to have it come back to bite you in the ass later on. Those wounds don't really ever heal and the weight of carrying the lie is heavier than any other weight known to man.