Pathological
liars often convince themselves of their lies, so they are believed when they inevitably
lie. When I was about 8 years old, I wanted to play with a stuffed
animal that I believed was my sister's. My sister was always very possessive, so I went and just took the stuffed
animal out of her bag of stuffed animals. She of course found out and was
trying to take it from me, so we went to get my mom. At that moment I knew that
if I finally wanted to play with this stuffed animal, I would have to convince my
mother that it was mine. It had been years of my sister convincing my mom that a
lot of my toys were hers, so I thought it was my turn. I made myself believe that
the stuffed animal was mine. I first convinced myself that it was mine, then I
proceeded to plead a lie so I could play with it. In the end, it had turned out
that it was not mine nor my sisters. It was in fact a stuffed animal from my mother’s
childhood, and in the end, she took it from both of us.
It always
made me upset that my sister would lie and continue to get away with it time
and time again, but when I tried it was an obvious lie which I could have
never know, as it was with my sister's stuffed animals. As I have gotten older, I
have realized that my sister genuinely believed herself, to tell the truth in every one of those situations. She wanted those toys so bad that she
made herself believe with everything in her, that those toys were hers. Even
though the fact was that they were not. This mindset has translated into her
adulthood. She often convinces herself that certain situations did not happen
the way that they did. Luckily as time goes on, she is getting better. No more “this
is just the way I am”. Instead, she is starting to work on her flaws. I would
like to think I had something to do with that, with my constant nagging, but
who knows what finally clicked, for her to realize that she needed to improve.
So, you see,
the human mind is easily manipulated. It only took me a few seconds to convince
myself a stuffed animal (that I knew was someone else’s) was in fact mine. And in
my sister's head, she was not doing anything wrong because she had convinced herself
prior that those toys were hers.
