Making Stuff Up
Confession: I make stuff up.
In fact, I make my living from it.
I have a strong childhood memory of telling a teacher in the primary school playground that our dog Rebel had just given birth to puppies. We did have a dog called Rebel. But Rebel was male and there were no puppies to be seen. This was a stupid thing to say considering that my mother was also a teacher at same primary school and I could easily be found out. Although there were no real consequences of this lie, Mum chided me to ‘stop making stuff up’.
Even then I was vaguely aware that she was wrong. I was lying. These things are distinct. Making stuff up is not lying. It’s what makes us human.
The historian is somewhat of a double-agent in this business of making up. We seek to unravel layers of stories, to understand when, where, how and why they were told, and for what purpose, as well the most crucial part: what was left unsaid. Then we unceremoniously sweep up the loose threads of these stories to spin our own, adding fat footnotes for the illusion of rigour.
For my whole life I told people I was allergic to bananas, because I was in fact scared of them.
It never bothered me as a child, but my eldest asked me as a toddler if I’d ever told him a lie and I crumbled.
Over a decade of illusion, shattered, and a lot of embarrassment in having to explain to everyone that I was just deathly afraid to be near one. 😂😂
I made a bunch of stuff up when I was aged 6 or 7. That I had a broken arm, which was 'why' I couldn't do handstands like everyone else (and not because I thought it looked dangerous and stupid)...I tried to reinforce this lie with a bit of plastic cut from a detergent bottle hidden under my sleeve cuff. And particularly stupidly, that my mother had had a baby. As she collected me from school every day, what was I thinking? Well, I was the only child still at home with mum and dad, I was just lonely?