You Really Thought You Had Something There, Didn't You?

Jun 26

Some lies are calculated. Others are compulsive. And then there are the ones so outrageously, insultingly dumb that they circle all the way back around to genius—if only in their audacity. This essay is about those lies. The kind told not to conceal the truth, but to assert dominance. To rattle you. To reclaim control when someone senses they’re losing it. It's a personal response to one of the most absurd and poorly constructed manipulations I’ve ever been on the receiving end of—something that should have knocked the wind out of me, but instead left me blinking, baffled, and kind of impressed by the level of delusion it required.

I came across one of those lies recently—the kind so clumsy in its execution and bloated with arrogance that it made me pause and marvel, not at the deceit, but at the sheer confidence it took to say it out loud…well, in writing, which makes it even worse.

There was a vague reference to an elder requiring care, a haughty explanation of why an “onslaught” of emails couldn’t possibly be addressed, and—my personal favourite—a bold claim that an “autoreply” had been activated to keep me at bay. The only snag? The alleged autoreply responded to everyone. Multiple times. From an email platform that doesn’t even support reply-all in autoresponses. So unless the laws of email physics took a brief holiday that afternoon, it’s clear someone was sitting there, clicking "reply all," and pretending it was Microsoft Outlook’s fault. And for what? To seem unavailable? To duck accountability? During a legal process where honesty is literally the thing on trial?

But I think I get it now. I really do. Because I’ve been reading. Not just the internet’s greatest hits, but the clinical stuff—DSM-5, peer-reviewed studies, accepted psychological frameworks. If only to try to understand whatever this is - I can’t even call it lying?

And here’s what I believe to be true: some people—especially those with traits of malignant narcissism and psychopathy—cannot help themselves when it comes to lying to the person they’ve cast as their target. It’s not strategy. It’s compulsion. They lie, not because they’ve assessed the risk and think they’ll win, but because they’re psychologically wired to dominate the narrative at any cost. Pathological lying is frequently linked with narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy, particularly when combined with a lack of empathy, a need for control, and a sense of superiority that borders on delusional. The goal isn’t truth—it’s power. And when their image is threatened, they panic and lie bigger, louder, and dumber.

And sometimes, they forget how obvious they’re being.

Because there’s another layer to this. A specific kind of grandiosity—well-documented in narcissistic pathology—that compels a person to believe they are the authority in situations where they are objectively not. They reframe reality to centre themselves. They misrepresent their role in formal processes. They speak as though they are the judge, the jury, the administrative gatekeeper, and the emotional lead all in one. Disagreement becomes “abuse.” Simple documentation becomes “an attack.” And your polite insistence on transparency becomes something they are graciously entertaining. It isn’t confidence. It’s distortion. It’s a type of self-appointment to power that is so detached from reality, it becomes its own form of evidence.

And so, they lie. And they lie badly. And they hope it works.

But I don’t have to match them. I don’t have to lie back. I don’t have to craft anything. I have the truth. I have the receipts. And now, I have the ridiculous gift of knowing that every word they typed, every reply-all, every invented autoresponse only further proved what I had already said.