You Were a Great Liar, Kid... Not a Great Actor

Part 2.3 of the Book of Balance series...

Author’s Note: For more context on the Book of Balance series, I recommend you read Part 1, which explains the theme. And this is the last one to get emailed out! After this, please find the rest of these articles here on my Substack or at my website!

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If you’re here for entry 2.3 in my Book of Balance series, you’re up to date on how my adoptive son died because of me, and how I shed my guilt for failing him.

And, if you’ve read either of those? Thank you! It’s important to me that he’s seen, finally.

Anyway, the hardest part of this entire process was reckoning with our downfall. Because the truth is, he died when we were estranged, which is the fucking worst. It meant that he died surface-level hating me.

Hating me?

Me? The mamabear he had loved so truly, madly, deeply? My cub, who soul-bonded with me, died hating me!?

It was the easiest thing in the world to believe in that narrative. That was what his words were saying, after all.

But the deeper parts of me, the parts that transcend grief? They called bull-honkey. They knew that there was more to the story, and they forced me back into Nightmare Mode to examine the evidence.

So today, I’m going to walk you through the most hideous interactions I had with my cub after our fight, the emotional reaction those words elicited, and how I pushed through to face every horrible thing he said to me so I could find the truth buried beneath his pain.

The writer’s greatest gift is understanding motives…

I have been a storyteller since the moment my mouth learned to function, and a proficient writer since the age of 15… give or take. And one of the most important things to me — as a kid who knew her life’s purpose by middle school — was to learn everything I could about people.

That isn’t to say that I started reading psychology texts, per se. Rather, I started examining characters in stories and real life. Why were my friends (or lack thereof) the way they were? My parents? My brothers? Cousins? That weird guy in that movie? That lady who did that thing at the mall?

What was their motivation? Why are they the way they are?

I had to know, to be a good writer. If you were to browse my embarrassing first series, The Tomes of Ra, you would find a lot of people doing things just because, and a lot of stuff happening to them just because. It’s a lot like modern television programming, frankly.

…Though I still think I was outwriting The Rings of Power at the age of 16.

But that’s because I learned how to people! I learned how they worked, and I figured out that if I looked far enough back into their lives, I could figure out the “why did they do that?” all on my own most of the time.

Psychology classes came a bit later.

The initial incident…

One of the most brutal parts about the rift that opened between my adoptive son and I, was that it happened because of a “nothing fight.”

You know “nothing fights,” right? The ones that happen for no reason beyond one or both people are having feelings they don’t know how to deal with, so they get emotional and reactive?

That’s what split us. But what happened that day, as inexplicable as it felt in the moment, was completely understandable in hindsight.

The foundation of our relationship had been recently rocked and we hadn’t had a chance to work through it yet. He was having a rough time emotionally reconciling everything that was going on in his life, including all this newness he was experiencing with me...

Ergo, he had also been healing in new ways and learning a lot of new things. It was a lot for someone to process, especially when he already had overloaded processors. This new loving, restorative relationship, with which he had no prior experience, was starting to cause too much newness.

So with all of these memories giving me all of this context, I realized what happened in that fight on his end, more or less.

We had been talking things through. He was tense and wound up. I already de-escalated his bubbling rage twice. Third time’s the charm, right?

Do you want to know what I asked him, that broke our relationship?

“Would you like me to take the lead on navigating our way through the emotional stuff?”

Pretty rude, eh? What a devastating question. [yes, sarcasm] But, all pettiness aside, I get it. I get why he got mad over that. Even if it wasn’t fair to me, even if my question was genuine and the intention was to take weight off his shoulders…

I know his defense mode. It was a place where anything could be filtered through a lens of personal failure. I had only scratched the surface of this particular landmine of his, so I hadn’t learned how to navigate it yet. And oops, foot on the wrong spot — BOOM!

I stepped on the mine, but I’m not the one who planted it.

It was the tension and uncertainty and probably a good degree of embarrassment and self-loathing, and with nowhere constructive to point it, it was pretty easy to find a reason to blame me for this overload.

After all, all of these changes were happening because of me. And they were hard. EVERYTHING was new. And he was struggling a lot, even though I tried my best to highlight that every effort he made was a huge success to me. But he had trust issues generally and I understand why it was hard to believe me when I said I was proud of him when he thought he was endlessly failing.

The brutality to follow…

I can say with 100% conviction that I did not deserve the landslide of slander that came at me a few days later. The rewriting of the narrative of our relationship. The brutal return of his apartment key.

And I certainly didn’t deserve to have my one secret weaponized against me.

That’s a tough thing to forgive. Trusting someone with your most vulnerable secrets, and then having that trust betrayed?

That is, actually, unforgivable behavior.

And yet, I forgave him.

Why?

Because I know what a cornered animal looks like and the panic they feel and the desperation that sweeps through them, the more hopelessness closes in. And I know that the only reason he would have betrayed me on that level was if he was losing his fucking mind.

He needed this to stop. This pain. This spiral. This fight. This relationship. Everything. All of it. Make it stop. Make it STOP. MAKE IT STOP, NOW!

His roommate told me that he had never seen him spiral this hard. As such, I was disgusted at this roommate for not encouraging my cub to come home. I shamed him into the bowels of the earth for his complacency and lazy neglect. …Maybe that didn’t help get him on my side.

But when it came to parsing out the truth, this encounter was more than just an opportunity for me to verbally shame someone who admitted to turning on me when I had been nothing but kind to him.

That roommate had been with my cub for longer than I had. He’d seen some shit. So that little detail, about how he’d never spiraled like this… that told me so much.

Because, even though we’d only been together 9 months, I’d seen some shit too. Some shit he said he had never shown anyone else.

And he was hurting because of me. But not because of what I said, but more because I existed. He was hurting and scared and overwhelmed because the weight of his entire life was coming crashing down around him all of a sudden.

For a kid whose tools were still on the level of sticks and stones? How could you expect him to survive that cosmic weight? I didn’t care that he messed up. I wanted him to be okay with being messy, so long as he was trying to be kind.

(Thanks,

Adrian Landin

, for the song!)

The near-peace-making…

After meeting with his roommate, he still didn’t speak to me until exactly a month had passed. It seemed like a predetermined amount of time.

And, surprise surprise, he was still angry. The accusations, however, were equally telling.

First, some context: Amongst all of his closest friends, there was one girl about whom I had to keep my mouth shut. I mentioned her briefly in my last piece. She was an ex-girlfriend whom he knew from the local drugs ‘n’ DJs scene. She had treated him abysmally when they were seeing one another, but they had reached a more peaceful relationship where he performed at her events and they spraypainted electrical boxes together, and they still hooked up every once in a while.

Here are some fun facts about this ex of his:

1. Before we met, she specifically never looked at me.

2. When we met, after shaking hands, she ignored and avoided me at every possible opportunity.

3. When he stopped spending so much time with her (because he was spending it with me), she suddenly offered him “girlfriend intimacy” — something she never offered when they were actually dating

It’s also telling that — little imp that he was — he delighted in shooting her down. He had a healing moment that drained his libido and he felt empowered every time she pursued him and he said no. He hadn’t had that sort of authority in the relationship before.

She later justified her coldness on meeting me as her “not having known that I was the mamabear,” and assured him that she wanted to get to know me, since I was the reason he was doing so well.

You wanna know how I knew that was a lie? For one, she made no effort to get to know me after making the claim. But she showed her hand when he told me that the moment he said we were at odds, she claimed that she had “seen through me the whole time” and tried — in not even the most intelligent manner — to convince him that I had been somehow using or manipulating him for my benefit.

Not the most logical bait, but when you’re starving for someone to justify your mistake, you’ll believe pretty much anything sometimes.

I then pointed out that, if she “saw through me” all along, that meant she lied to him when she said she wanted to get to know me, so who between us was the proven liar?

Beyond that, her major claim over me related to debts. He and I had an agreement on this front, because I’m a po’ person too and I had limits to what I could do for him on that front. I would have willingly bankrupted myself for him, but I also understood that I could better support him if I had food and a home too, so I needed some boundaries. And from his end, he wanted to participate in his own journey and not just receive handouts. It was a mutual agreement and flexible in his favor.

The deal was simple: anything that I got him as a gift was a gift, freely given with love. However, he reimbursed me in scenarios where I was including him in my orders from, for example, food salvage (helping to fill his pantry so he wasn’t eating in survival mode all the time).

And he was good about it. At the time of our parting, he was only about 150€ in debt to me, and that’s not enough to kill me. It was an amount I would willingly sacrifice in favor of the chance to talk things through with him, and I told him as much.

I did not deny that there were debts, because there were. But I would not let them get twisted by some envious, manipulative outsider. I told him that I would waive the debt immediately if he would agree to talk things through with me sometime, when he was ready.

I could feel his tone shift, even in text. He came in angry, but he left agreeing with me, talking peacefully, and requesting some space — setting a boundary like that was extremely vulnerable for him, so it says a lot that he was willing to ask. We agreed to return one another’s belongings. I surely told him that I was here for him anytime he needed me, but to take all the time he needed.

Now, again, I could focus on all the angry nonsense that he said to me in the beginning, but in the end, that was his self-defense, his way of protecting himself from himself. He needed to be justified in having snapped at me, and rather than fighting him on it, I told him his reaction was justified, apologized for the part I played in it, and let him be who he was.

Rude of me, right?

Unpacking what looked like an intentional dunk…

Sometimes, us social media era folks have a tendency to express ourselves publicly through music. Like in Instagram stories.

Some three days after we made our peace and agreed to taking some time apart, we had another conversation that nearly destroyed me, because I was sure I had fucked everything up after he yelled at me and blocked me.

It started when I broke my truce because of a song he had posted on Instagram. I’m not gonna share it because then you’ll learn my deepest, darkest secret — my real name — but suffice to say, this song is not so gently talking to someone with my name and more or less tells them to fuck off and die.

Umm… ouch.

What the hell, kid, I thought we just made peace!?

That’s not even what I said. I did start with an apology for breaking the silence so soon but… just a quick question to clarify something: what’s up with the slam track?

I had fully expected a self-defense, so he completely disarmed me by saying, “what are you talking about? It’s one of my favorite songs.”

I pointed out the rather poignant lyrical association to me. Once again, I was not expecting his response:

“oh… oh god, fuck I’m so sorry. Do you want me to take it down?” [or something like that]

My response was probably a mistake, but I told him it didn’t really make any difference, the damage had been done.

Now here’s the thing… that part of the conversation? That was him, genuinely, and I’m grateful he gave me that, because it told me the truth of where he was at. He had no reason to defend me or be nice to me at that point. I told him to take all the time he needed to be mad at me and I’d give him space, and I was breaking that silence a mere 3 days after it started… to point out that he was still hurting me without even trying.

He could have just called out any number of venting songs I had posted and shamed me into the ground. I’d have deserved that and he’d have been justified in telling me to shut up while blocking me.

But… that wasn’t how he replied. He was genuinely sorry for hurting me and asked if he should take the song down.

So if he was already feeling pretty guilty about this fight in the first place, I may have accidentally reminded him that he was the instigator and the escalator, and he didn’t even need to try actively to make things worse. It just happened by proxy of him existing.

This is when the shift happened.

I knew his text patterns, remember. They had changed significantly during the past 9 months as he had slowly stopped doing a ton of drugs. So when he disappeared for those 5-10 minutes and returned to the conversation in a completely different mood and barely coherent?

Wasn’t hard to figure out what happened on his end.

He went from sad and apologetic to shouting at me that he was too fucked up and he just needed space and he’s been so upset lately that he’s started shooting up and his roommates were sending him to rehab tomorrow.

I had no words.

It felt like everything we had built together was unraveling in front of me. He was hurting so badly and it was all because of me somehow and I just wanted him to stop this needless war and come home. I begged him to just talk this out with me, it doesn’t have to be like this.

He screamed at me that we’d talk once he was done with rehab and to please just leave him the fuck alone.

That’s when he blocked me.

Once again, I thought I had fully fucked up everything. But after I peeled back the surface layer of “fuck you, I hate you” that was trying to smother me, I found a more logical explanation for what made him turn on me again.

I didn’t deserve the song slap. He didn’t do it on purpose, but he obviously understood why I would take it that way I had. And yet, I told him that I understood and wasn’t holding it against him. He hadn’t ruined anything. It hurt, but it was an accident.

His ability to reconcile that, sadly, was just not where it needed to be. If someone forgives you when you don’t believe you deserve it? It can feel intolerable. Every time he tried to make a move that justified our fight, I deflected it by loving him more than I was hurt or upset.

In a game of chess, I didn’t just win a victory, I nuked my opponent and left him pinned under the table.

… and fuck me, because I was not trying to win a victory. I was trying to get him out of a self-loathing spiral.

Our final encounter and the days that followed…

So, again, if you’ve been following the story so far, you know that the next part is the most devastating, because we almost made peace. And then, a few days later, I was told that the peace we made was a lie.

Which I believe is the real lie.

Here’s where the title of this article comes into play. The world bred my cub to be a liar. He told me early on that he learned to lie young because the truth got him smacked, but because I had never responded in anger, he wanted to put his entire trust in me.

So I knew exactly how he lied and in what situations — namely, ones where he felt threatened. This is why I believe that his actions spoke infinitely louder than the words he didn’t even dare to say to me himself.

Let’s take a moment to separate my cub and the traumatized version of him, because let’s be honest, they weren’t the same person. He and I even used to refer to the trauma-cub by his original last name, while my bear cub used his family’s name from around five generations back: Karhu. Oh hey, by the way, that translates to “bear,” if you weren’t already convinced that the universe didn’t drop him on my doorstep on purpose.

Here’s the breakdown of the rave, when we almost met up:

1. I see my cub. He doesn’t see me. He’s there doing some early preparations for the event and goes elsewhere for a while (his set isn’t until 4 a.m. and it’s ~7-8 p.m.).

2. Some 4 hours later, I’m outside while my friend has a smoke. I see him returning with some friends and say his name to get his attention. He sees me. His eyes blaze and he continues to go inside. Trauma = triggered.

3. All encounters throughout the night are extremely hostile. He’s either screaming at me or slandering me in Finnish to his friends. I understand enough Finnish to not take that shit, which is making him feel more cornered. His usual self-preservation tactics bounce off me.

4. After our final confrontation, I’m ready to give up and make my peace with the fact that he just fucking hates me now, for reasons I cannot reconcile.

5. My friends offer to step in. I accept one offer: the friend who knew my cub, spoke his language, and had a vested interest in our relationship.

6. My cub agrees to talk to him with zero resistance.

7. They disappear for about 20 minutes.

8. They come back in. He tells me he wants to make things right, and acknowledges the exact right way to do it. He offers to hug me (twice). He warmly reminisces. He invites me to stay to watch their show, assuring me that it’ll be great.

Three days later, he tells me — by proxy of his cousin — all of that was a lie, that he was just trying to de-escalate the situation. He made some creative accusations, like how his friends were scared of me and were wondering if they needed to call the cops (I wasn’t aware that attendance at live events qualified a criminal offense, but hey, I don’t claim to know much about law).

So, when someone screams at you, via their cousin, about how much they hate you and how every effort to reconcile was a lie… once again, it’s hard not to take that at face value.

But he made one crucial error at the end. He didn’t own the hate.

I’ll confess that he broke me. This was actually too devastating and so I got real with the trauma-cub. I told him that if he wanted to make ridiculous accusations, here are the next shows that I’ll be at in his scene so he can make a choice to avoid me, and that I truly hoped I would never see him again. As far as I was concerned, the person he was trying to not be was strangling the person he was trying to become. I wanted my bear cub back, not whoever this person was that was destroying us both.

I’ll unpack that poor choice of words another time.

Here’s the thing about my cub’s cousin. He had fond memories of my cub from their youth and felt bad for him… but ultimately didn’t think any more of him than the rest of the world. He told me he assumed my cub would end up in jail like his brothers and dad eventually. So… even my kid’s favorite family member didn’t know how much heart he had.

This cousin also had a very blunt way of telling me everything my cub said, straight-up, without the tiniest trace of sugar-coating.

He told me that after my final words, my cub apparently cussed me the fuck out… and then deleted the message.

He didn’t own the hate.

If he wanted to convince both his cousin and me that he hated me, he should have let that stand. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t go that far.

And in that moment… even his cousin believed that my version of him was real.

Another piece of evidence in favor of the retraction being the real lie was that I saw the shift in his energy at the show, before and after we made peace. While he may have been good at lying, he was no actor. His emotions were painted all over him in neon lights and outlined with glow-in-the-dark glitter.

The hunched shoulders, scowl, and literal cloud of doom and gloom hovering over him? Evaporated. Chest open, chin up, walking proud, smiling widely, light as air, doing this weird walk he put on when he had been drinking and was in a really fucking good mood.

That tells me a lot more than a message he didn’t have the guts to tell me himself.

Oh… there’s also one other reason why I think hating me was a load…

My friend told me he spent the entire time outside gushing about how I was such a real mom to him and how he loved me and how his life had become a nightmare in the last half a year. There was not a word of hate toward me. My friend had simply told him to come in and talk to me, so he had.

I don’t believe for one moment that he spent twenty minutes owning his genuine mistakes and praising me for having loved him when no one else did… just to de-escalate a situation. Five minutes, and I might believe it, but not twenty.

I also remember a cub who was a really fucking good DJ who loved showing off to his mamabear, and I can promise you that if he hated me and was just de-escalating the situation? He’d have absolutely taken me up on his offer to leave before his band played. He hated anything that stressed him out before a show and if my presence was agitating him and he was lying about reconciling? He’d have taken the out I offered him when I said I would leave.

But here’s what he said:

"No. Stay. We’re gonna be the best act of the night. You should see it.”

Sorry, cub, but I don’t buy into your hate…

I promise that I could and have gone ten times deeper into this, but I honestly think this article is pretty friggin’ long already, so I’ll just ramble my point out now…

The rhetoric always states that our words don’t cover the full meaning of what we say. There’s a lot more to our deeper psychology than what we communicate with our words.

When you lose someone to something that feels deeply preventable, like overdose or suicide, we rarely get a nice, clean farewell. As poetic as some deaths can be (shout out to my cousin for the way he left things with his mom, or a dear friend’s father, who recently left with a smile on his face after telling his family how much he loved them), sometimes we lose people at very inopportune moments. Sometimes our last memories with someone are absolutely not representative of our entire relationship with them.

And it’s okay for that to be the case, and it’s okay to be upset about it.

We get engulfed by an avalanche of feelings that span the full spectrum. You know. I know you know. A lot of those feelings feel rude and disingenuous. Someone just died, after all. You’ve got to be respectful. But when we feel resentment despite wanting to respect the dead, we tend to guilt spiral a bit.

In defiance of this, sometimes I blast specific angry songs at him and I can feel his laughter and blissful acceptance, radiating love. It’s like an inside joke between us.

So I would like to give you permission, when someone you love dies, to be as petty as you absolutely fucking can, for as long as you need to.

I mean, look at what my cub put me through. He spent months lying to me, to himself, to everyone he knew, torturing me, all because the world broke him too much to believe that he was worthy of love.

I’m allowed to be pissed about all of the betrayals, even though he died in the end. I can be pissed at him for abandoning me and breaking every promise he made. For rewriting our reality, which had been the most beautiful thing I was ever a part of. For choosing to try again with his birth mom instead of me, because that’s who he thought he deserved.

That’s the truth of it. I’ve hated him. I’ve raged, screamed, cried. It doesn’t matter that he’s gone… he left me behind. I believed in him and he didn’t. How could he?

But, after doing all this polar dipping into who he was and why he was broken enough to pass away the way he did… I understand. It sucks, but I do.

And if I focus on what was most important to me, it was what we had. He never tried to convince me that what we had wasn’t real, and that’s the ultimate tell. If he had been lying the entire time, then maybe I was the sucker and he did die hating me.

But our love was true, pure, and the most real thing I’ve ever felt. And the memory of that real and true love is what reminds me of the truth even though fear and pain won the battle in the end.

So even though everything about this whole story hurts more than anything has ever hurt me before (and I’ve had giardia, my guys), I made the active choice to honor the best of him and make sure that the one person in the world that he showed his true self to remembers him for that version of himself… not the one dominated by trauma.

That’s how I move on when the various phases of grief rear their hydra heads and threaten to overwhelm me. Because grief is nonlinear. It always comes back. So when anger, depression, denial, and bargaining start to haunt me? I let them, until I start wondering why I cared for this person…

And that’s when the millions of things that made it worthwhile come flooding in.

In the end, that grief is just a reflection of love, and that’s what we’re making space for when we feel the pain out. It’s important to air out all the bitterness so we have room in our hearts to remember why we loved them so much in the first place.

If this helped you feel something you’ve denied yourself? Please let me know!

And hey… if I’ve given the false impression that I was awesome at all of this, don’t worry, I’m calling myself out in part 2.4!

Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻

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Note from the Author: Thank you, deeply, if you read this.

If you enjoyed this bit of writing, perhaps you might enjoy reading life stories set in a fictional world where balance and deep healing journeys are central to the narrative. If that sounds interesting, please check out my novella series, The Vitmar Chronicles… a slice-of-life coming-of-age series that follows two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs.

Read the free sample here — Learn about the series here — Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Volume II is coming in August!