The lies we tell ourselves become the truth of who we are. It was the Autumn of ’89 when I first heard that. We were in the pre-fab classroom the school had put up temporarily whilst they refurbished the Sixth Form block. It was cold, there was an electric wall radiator that leeched heat into the room but you only really felt it if you were at the two desks right next to it. We asked Watson, the Physics teacher, about it and pretended to be interested when he started talking about thermal radiation and conduction and convection. A few of us afterwards kicked around the idea of forming a band called Thermal Radiation – we were all try hard goths back then – but settled on Conviction Convection in tribute to Watson’s enthusiasm. None of us did that well in Physics.
I wasn’t sat at one of the warm desks that day. I was near the door, it was the worst place to be as the seals had worn from the repeated opening and closing since the start of term. There was a draught. I was hunched up, exhaling my breath to see if it was visible. I thought I’d read somewhere that the school had to let you out if the temperature was below a certain level and this was going to be my evidence. The fact that I didn’t actually know that temperature threshold or how that related to the point at which breath vaporised to mist were just inconvenient details. Like I said, none of us did well in Physics. Vaporised To Mist, though, was mooted as Conviction Convection’s first song but I think we nixed it in favour of Chaos Defrost after Pete saw it written as a setting on a microwave in Currys. The song wasn’t as good as the title but, to be honest, that was pretty much our default.
Written down this next bit will sound more dramatic than it was. It’ll look like a metaphor. If it’s like a metaphor does that make it a simile? I used to care about that stuff and I think it was him that made me care. The door swung open, it opened into the room and pushed a rush of cold air through the desks, through the chairs, rustling pages in text books, snaking its way round ankles exposed under too-short, one-more-term trousers, stealing over bored faces, blowing away tiredness from dry eyes. A man entered, maybe early forties, slightly untidy salt and pepper hair, close cropped beard, shirt sleeves rolled up despite the cold. He paced around the room which had fallen silent save for the reaching for papers that had been displaced by his arrival; boys retrieving their scrawled notes on Keats and Orwell, Austen and Marlowe. He stopped by the radiator and gestured that we should come closer. Nobody moved, not quite knowing what to do, until he spoke:
“Gather in boys. Gather in. If convention means you’re too cold to learn then I say convention is bullshit. Pull up your chair and gather in.”
Okay, it was quite dramatic by our usual school standards. None of us had really heard a teacher swear before. There was that incident with a supply cover the previous year when they’d finally cracked under constant baiting about why they couldn’t get a permanent job and told us to “fuck off back to our over privileged detached houses on cultural wasteland cul-de-sacs”. I thought it was fair although technically my parents lived in a semi. Obviously we stole the line about cultural cul-de-sacs for the band which broadly offset the week of detention we also got. This new guy was different though; it was a deliberate choice of words, said softly, conversationally. It didn’t even seem like he’d seen Dead Poet’s Society that summer and was trying on a new set of post Captain-My-Captain clothes. We’d had a lot of that in the first couple of weeks of term with the arts teachers, in particular, seeming to embrace the idea of getting us to go on walks and stand on things to challenge our notions of conformity. I think the Head pulled them all in and stopped it after one of the third year kids slipped off his desk during a stirring rendition of a poem he’d written about why girls didn’t want to play Dungeons & Dragons with him. It was called “no dice”. Hairline fracture of his wrist which was unfortunate as it almost certainly put a temporary stop to his other major hobby at the time.
The rest of that lesson was more routine. A standard dissection of “Ode To A Nightingale” and a straight refusal of any of our attempts to move the discussion on to the extent of the Romantic poets’ drug consumption. What does the text tell you. Always back to the text. What does the text tell you. Is it true for you? That was what we came to understand as his key question, the one he always brought us back to for the rest of that year. He was always interested in this idea of truth and I don’t think I really understood what he was doing until much later, until after I’d told myself so many lies. But I was a teenage boy and understanding things – the real things – isn’t our strong suit.
Alongside the literary criticism and deconstruction he made us write. That was the first time he used the line about the lies we tell ourselves becoming the truth of who we are. I don’t remember it exactly but the gist of it was something like this: fiction is just truth disguised as lies, it’s made up, licensed lying. Use that license and tell your truth under that cover. The lies we tell ourselves become the truth of who we are so make sure you tell yourself the best kind of lies. The ones that are truth. I lied before, I remember it like it was yesterday, each and every word. But acknowledging that someone could reach me that closely, still, from so long ago, is a truth that I need a lie to hide behind.
So that year, I wrote. I mangled rhymes into poetry, flirted with blank verse (it didn’t flirt back, not a flicker), forced out prose, poured my all-out-of-perspective teenage heart into words upon words upon words. It wasn’t all overblown pubescent angst and existentialism. Despite the huge amount of moody goth music I was listening to I wrote some funny stuff, some parody reworking of the texts we were studying, a short play about the band imploding which proved eerily prescient although our demise ended up being more prosaic than my concocted conclusion. We fell out over how much dry ice should form part of our opening number. Everyone wanted the whole stage fogged up thick with it except for John, the guitarist, who said he couldn’t see his chorus pedal on the floor. He walked off one night when he stomped on his fuzz pedal instead and ruined the start of Chaos Defrost. I think we could have salvaged it but there was so much dry ice swirling around that it took him a couple of minutes to actually make his dramatic exit, he walked into the drum kit and then almost went over the side of the stage before he found the right way. It was a slow exit, stage right.
Nobody saw the stuff I wrote, except the stuff that was specifically for an assignment and that always felt a little filtered to me. Like I was keeping a part of myself back from everyone else. I guess I was. As well as not acing Physics I also wasn’t studying Psychology but even I can see that I was keeping a slight remove, keeping the truths I really needed to lie about for just myself.
I found it all recently and can see the traces of myself in there. The traces of who I am now from those dispatches from the past. It was a good reminder. I can even, in retrospect, see which bits were really my truth and which bits were just the lies I was telling myself, the lies I’ve continued telling myself.
Under the license of lies I decided it was time to start looking for my truth again. Time for some more stories.
This is a thinly veiled framing device for the stories I’m planning to write in July 2023. It’s not true but it contains truth and I suppose that’s the aim of all stories.
This one’s for all my English teachers. You taught me how to see and understand the world.
42 @ 42 