Personal Essay Blog Post #4

 As young children, we are often advised to adhere to a basic set of ethical guidelines: be kind, share, and don’t lie. Lying was presented as an immoral act and a betrayal of trust. When I was at this age, I developed a discomfort with lying, but not for the right reasons. My discomfort with lying doesn’t come from an inner good, but an irrational phobia. 

    My fear of lying was first instilled into me when I was in 2nd grade. It started when my father was snooping around the garage and noticed rancid smells nagging at him. He began to find that the source of these smells were wrapped sandwiches placed in remote corners of the house . These sandwiches found themselves situated in the most bizarre of places, finding their way into drawers and down to the bottoms of laundry bins. My father consulted with the rest of my family and found out that these sandwiches were the same ones my Mom was packing my brother and I for school lunch. One of us was going to be in big trouble. When I was told about all of this, I was bewildered: Why would my parents suspect me at all? It was obvious to me that my brother was the prime suspect to my parents, and I amusedly sat back to see how he would escape this predicament. He played dumb: he pretended to have no idea what these sandwiches were and where they came from.He expressed sheer disbelief at thes circumstances: the way he spoke, he sounded like he was implying these sandwiches apparated into our house. As the web of lies caught up to him, in a last ditch effort he tried to pin it all on me. My brother grew hysterical as my parents decidedly blamed him for hiding these sandwiches. I was not as sly as my brother. As he found himself defeated, I realized that if I attempted to lie like this, the outcome would be even worse. 

A year later when I was in 3rd grade, this newfound fear was set upon me for the first time. After a group of friends were rowdy in the school gym afterschool, we had to write official apologies to the afterschool teachers. My mother was infuriated with me and I swore to behave myself in school after that day. Two weeks later, me and a friend named John got in trouble in Music class after we kept talking during a dance routine. The teacher talked to both of us after class and gave us official slips of admonition. I immediately panicked. I was sure my Mom would kill me as soon as she found out. But this slip never made it to my parents. My initial feelings of relief soon turned to existential dread. I was convinced that my mother would find out eventually and my punishment would be even worse since I never told her in the first place. Anytime she called me upstairs, my heart sank. If I was rational, this dreadful anxiety would have disappeared within a few days after that Music class; however, this feeling stuck with me for around two years. I envisioned myself on my deathbed, telling my mother about the 3rd grade incident with the music teacher I hid from her all along. 

I didn’t realize until I reached middle school that the slip I received was meaningless. I looked back and laughed, but I never forgot the feeling of dread. If I had just told my mother that I had gotten in trouble in Music class, the punishment would seem negligible in comparison to the fear I lived with even though she never found out. The fear of lying has not escaped me since then, and I am sure that I could be caught in a web of lies just as my brother was with his sandwiches.