Shame. *bell ring* Shame. *bell ring* Shame.

I ain’t cutting my hair or showing you a nude selfie or anything, don’t get your hopes up. I’m baring myself in a much more significant way–displaying all my embarrassing awful history onto the internet.

So here’s the thing. I was undiagnosed my whole life regarding autism until about age 24. Looking back, I’m now recognizing a lot of behaviors were driven by this, along with a very natural desire to fit in among people to whom I could not relate and to whom I was very weird. And one behavior was that I was VERY overly influenced by TV and movies and what I thought was supposed to be “cool” and acceptable and I developed this notion that I needed a tragic backstory (I already had enough of this, actually, that was true, but I didn’t realize it at the time because I was only 13 and still in denial and very confused about it all, so I went for overkill).

I’ll just say it. I lied. I lied a lot. And not just in the half-cute omg what a little middle school idiot no harm done, like…it followed me for YEARS into college and beyond. I only came clean about ten years later, right around the time I was discovering my autism. It was just a habit by then, and for some reason I realized that it was total overkill and I needed to come clean.

Here are the lies:

1. The big one: I invented a person and pretended to be them online with my friends (who were mostly online at this point) and family. I pretended to be a college student at Brown named Ana who was encouraging me about my writing. I gave Ana a tragic backstory too–she had had a husband and a daughter that were killed in a car crash. And then, after she had spoken with friends and family long enough that they were like, who is this chick? I killed her off. She got pregnant again, and lost the baby at its birth, and killed herself. And for years I acted out my mourning and talked about her and…she was imaginary. In my head. It was really twisted and weird and I’m not even sure why I did it. I even told a friend of mine that she looked like her (seriously she was the spitting image of the image I made up). I know, I know, this is so fucked up.
2. I did hard drugs. I never did, not until college when I tried fake pot and like almost died a few times we did so much. That’s as hard as it got. But I told everyone I was doing cocaine and heroin and all that jazz, when like…no. I did pot, I smoked cigarettes, I drank, but that’s it.
3. I told everyone I had slept around a lot. I had this list of guys I supposedly slept with, complete with names, but it was a total lie. I even told my husband about them individually because he was curious about my slutty ways, but seriously? Only one person before him. That’s right, I’ve only slept with…three people in my life now (don’t ask about the third, it’s a long and hilarious story I’d rather do justice to with its own post). Decidedly not a slut (which I don’t think is a bad thing by the way–I have aspired to be a slut most of my days, but generally speaking I’m not that good at it). I lost my virginity at age 16 to a psychopath (the story of whom is recorded here on this blog, like a few posts back, maybe a page if you’re interested). I said I lost it at 13 to a dude I had cyber sex with on the internet (I was a wild child at heart who had no outlet but the internet, I did some STUPID THINGS)(yes I pretended I had sex with him for realsies. Ugh).

And that’s the gist of it. Three big lies that followed me around and I felt I had to stick with them for consistency. But I didn’t. I still haven’t come clean to my friends or anything, so this is what I’m doing with this post. Hopefully they’ll read it and understand that I was a very confused and very lost and very desperate young woman who got carried away with stupid white lies that turned into very big ones. (Yes, my husband knows, it’s to him that I came clean in the first place.)

So there you have it. My most embarrassing secret. I have done my walk of atonement, and here I rest, tired out and worried about judgment and blowback. Please, be gentle with me–I have truly moved on and feel like this is a part of my past, not my present.