Growing up Poor Made me A Pathological Liar 🤥

👨‍⚕️ My father worked as a dispenser at a government college. For those of you who don’t know what that means, it means he was the medical person responsible for treating injuries, accidents, and minor illnesses of students at a government college. Everyone called him doctor but he didn’t actually have an MBBS degree. It was a different degree, more like a diploma that you can get for 3 years of study (I think).

🤑 Growing up, I told a lot of my friends that my father was a doctor. I think until a certain age, I didn’t even know that he wasn’t a doctor. And when I did know, I continued telling my new friends that my dad was a doctor. Simply because it made us more “respectable” and perhaps “richer”. I always studied on scholarships in colleges and universities where everyone who was not on a scholarship was pretty rich. So you can image the type of excuses and lies I made for not going to my friend’s houses or for not inviting them to mine. The reality was I was never really allowed to go to my friend’s houses anyway but still, I invented plenty of reasons for every occasion.

🤥 Last week I read this article in NYtimes where the author talks about how growing up poor made him a pathological liar. And I cannot tell you how much I can relate to that. You should definitely check the entire article but here’s a summary if you’re short on time. The author basically talks about all the excuses he learnt to make as a child to hide his family’s poverty, and later as an adult, this made him a habitual liar even when he had no reason to lie. He discusses how he identified it, went to therapy, and worked on getting rid of the feeling of needing to lie about everything to impress others or to elevate his social status.

💰 I had the same problem. Lying about my family’s financial circumstances lead to a habit of lying just about anything if it can give me a higher social status in the eyes of my rich friends. I also always lied about the cast of my family picking always either “Jutt” or “Araien” or something instead of saying the real one which was “Machi” or “Khokhar”. Very few people even knew the cast but I always knew from my family, my cousines, and everyone else that I was supposed to be ashamed of being born a “Machi”. It was something I was supposed to hide or lie about. It wasn’t until I saw famous people wearing poverty as a badge of honour, that I realized I had been lying to people about my background (or even having the courage to say that investigating my background is none of your concern).

🥹 I did not go to therapy but I worked on my lying habits on my own. And knowing that rich famous people can also come from humble beginnings was the trigger that brought about this change. But I still don’t know if this would have happened if I remained in Pakistan. For any marriage proposals, I had no choice, I had to backup my parents on the cast system lies simply because our society and morals are so broken they wouldn’t consider you respectable unless you came from certain casts and had 7 generations of riches. I’m extremely happy to be living in a country where no one will ask my cast, or judge me for the amount of money my parents had, but I wonder how many people around me have to live hiding behind the walls of lies they have built due to a social and moral system that is completely broken?

Peace,

Sadia ❤️❤️