WARNING
Every Lie I’ve Ever Told deals with themes of mental illness, self-harm and suicide. My comedy-addled brain means I don’t know how to write without putting a joke on every page, but parts of this story may still be triggering to some people, which I completely understand and empathise with. Resources have been provided at the back of this book if you feel like you need to reach out.
Dedication
for Antonio
Contents
Dedication
I haven’t spent three hours online designing my wedding to nobody.
(I have. More than once. Oh god.)
I have never been the ringleader of a major crime operation.
(I was. For one glorious month, I was.)
I was really emotionally scarred by my abortion.
(Yeah, um, not really. Sorry.)
I’ve only had one abortion.
(Two. I’ve had two.)
I will never pose naked.
(Whoops.)
I did everything I could to help my sisters.
(I didn’t.)
I haven’t had bad sex since I promised myself I wouldn’t put up with it.
(Ha.)
I was very briefly possessed by the Devil.
(Look, I probably wasn’t, but I don’t think this one can be verified either way.)
I’ll never end up with someone like my dad.
(I was in it before I even realised what was happening.)
I’ve never hoped that my mum would die.
(I have. Recently.)
When I’m home alone, I always look sexy and never do anything weird.
(*laughs uproariously*)
I don’t believe anything psychics say.
(I didn’t, until something crazy happened.)
(And I know everyone says that their psychic story is crazy, but this was crazy.)
I’m okay
(The biggest lie I’ve ever told.)
Acknowledgements
Resources
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
I knew I’d officially hit rock bottom when somebody’s shit splattered the curtain of the hospital bed next to mine. A nurse had mercifully thought to pull it across at the last second, perhaps predicting in her frontline experience that an emergency-room enema can sometimes result in a projectile faeces situation. And let me tell you: this enema did. It really, really did.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it. One second, I was lying in my bed, barely noticing the shadowy silhouettes busy at work through the curtain. The next, I heard a moan, then a gasp, and then . . . It almost seemed fake, the way it sprayed perfectly and gratuitously across the curtain, the sound it made as it hit the fabric, the slow drips down to the floor.
It was the clichéd way blood splatters on walls in B-grade horror movies.
Except it was shit.
And it was just left there for hours, so I could either keep the curtain open and look in awe at the man it had all come out of, or I could keep the curtain closed and look at the shit itself. I alternated.
How had my life ended up at this point? How had I, at thirty, in the middle of what was easily the most successful and brilliant time of my life – except for maybe when I was cast as Little Red Rocking Hood in my Year 6 production of Little Red Rocking Hood – how had I ended up in the emergency room next to a B-grade horror movie enema poo blast?
Surely this was someone else’s life? Surely it was someone else who had downed all that vodka followed by so many pills? Surely it was someone else who was now lying in this bed, hooked up to a million drips, barely able to breathe through the physical pain in her body that didn’t even compare to the emotional pain in her brain? Surely it was someone else who had just witnessed 3am projectile enema poo?
This wasn’t me. It couldn’t be. I was successful. I had overcome, damn it. I WAS A FREAKING PHOENIX WHO HAD RISEN FROM THE FREAKING ASHES. My first book said so! My first book ended with me finding myself, with me leaving my mental-health struggles firmly in the past with my traumatic childhood. Whatever hardship I had faced, I had beaten it. I had won. Bestselling book. National tour. TV show in the works. My fridge broke and I could afford to buy a new one (like, a brand-new one – no more driving three hours like a chump to pick up 1980s whitegoods found on Gumtree). I had made it. All my dreams had come true, I had an operating fridge, I was doing brilliantly, and I had written the memoir to prove it. I even had online haters.
I had conquered life at thirty, and nothing was ever going to go wrong again!
What a total fraud.
And as I lay in that hospital bed, the remains of the enema poo on one side of me and concerned friends on the other, the same few thoughts kept going through my head. First, that the nurses all wore very fancy Nikes and it was brilliant product placement because now I really wanted a pair. Second, that I really wanted to remember what episode of Will & Grace the Subway Tush song came from, because I was singing it in my head over and over and over and over. And third, how ironic it was that right in the middle of writing my second book, a book about all the random lies I’ve told in my life, I’d ended up telling the most significant lie of all.
I haven’t spent hours online designing my wedding to nobody.
(I have. More than once. Oh god.)
There is a secret folder on my computer. I created it a few years ago, when I realised my embarrassing secret needed to be contained, and contained quietly. Nobody knows about the folder, because if they did I would need to move to one of those witness protection towns in middle America where men who work at service stations are always chewing on a single piece of hay and wear overalls with a red handkerchief hanging out of the back pocket. That’s how far I’d have to go.
The folder is labelled ‘Rosie’s Tax Invoices’, but I’m a thirty-year-old with a Polly Pocket collection, so obviously I don’t actually keep my tax invoices organised in a folder on my desktop (why would I spend time doing things like my taxes when I could be on eBay looking for the 1993 Fairylight Wonderland edition that actually lights up?).
No – the ‘tax’ label is a genius and complex ruse, designed to keep prying eyes from snooping at my secret shame. You know how people panic about their internet history getting into the wrong hands? Everybody laughs and says, ‘If I die nobody let my mum see my internet history! *cheeky wink*’ But behind the laughter, everybody is secretly anxious about that time they typed ‘microwave popcorn foot tampon sex thing’ into Google.
(And hey, I get it. We’ve all been in that weird, depressed place, when the show you’ve been binge-watching is over, and the hole it leaves in your life feels like a death. Then, in an attempt to fill the vast emptiness of the post binge-watching void, you start searching all the actors who were in the show on Wikipedia, then you’re shocked that one of them is the brother of the guy who wrote that other show, and that show is based on that famous conspiracy from the 1960s, and that conspiracy started when that woman was kidnapped by that psycho, and psychopathy has a test you can take now to see if you are one, and you aren’t one but you reckon that girl from high school is, and after looking at her Facebook page you find yourself on her first boyfriend’s new wife’s page, where you see that meme with Kermit drinking tea making a joke about a weird sex fetish, and when you go to tag someone underneath you see that someone else has tagged a friend and written ‘lol remember the microwave popcorn foot tampon sex thing??’ so then you google ‘microwave popcorn foot tampon sex thing’, and not only do you see some weird stuff, but you suddenly realise you’ve been online for six hours.)
(Or you just sat down at your computer one day and typed in ‘microwave popcorn foot tampon sex thin
g’, because that’s your jam and you’re not ashamed. In which case, good for you, please continue living your best life.)
The secret folder is the one thing on my computer I panic about people seeing, and it’s not even filled with freaky porn that is slowly stopping me from being able to orgasm normally.
The folder on my computer labelled ‘Rosie’s Tax Invoices’ is actually filled with . . . Oh god. I hate myself. It’s filled with wedding stuff.
So. Much. Wedding. Stuff. I actually kind of wish it was freaky porn.
I honestly don’t even know how it started. I just found a picture online of a ring I liked one day, and before I knew it, I was making fake folders and disguising jpegs and signing up to the Vera Wang website. There have been times I’ve turned down social invitations because I was so far down a Pinterest ‘funky table setting’ rabbit hole that it just didn’t feel worth it to leave the house.
The folder would easily have at least five hundred pictures in it by now, although I stopped counting a while ago. Engagement rings, flowers, wedding dresses, invitations, bridesmaids’ gowns, shoes, suits for the groom, lighting, food . . . I’ve got it all covered in my folder of lies.
This thing goes so deep, there is actually wedding Inception on my laptop now – just like the folder they are hidden in, each jpeg has its own special name so as to avoid detection. That oval diamond with the dainty gold band? ‘Editorial Meeting June 2013’. The Christian Siriano dress with the sleeves I like? ‘Payslip May 2016’.
‘Rosie’s Tax Invoices’ is like the Bermuda Triangle of shame on my computer – I can’t go in there without my dignity disappearing.
But how did I end up here? How did I end up knee-deep in a creepy cesspool of wedding-picture shame?
I was never the little girl who cared about weddings, or anything girly, really. While other little ladies were dressed as princesses, I was kicking a kid out of my birthday party for refusing to concede that the Ninja Turtles were better than Batman (they were and continue to be and I won’t hear another word about it). While my sister was in her room with friends putting on make-up and dancing to Ace of Base, I was curled up in bed reading Goosebumps, waiting for Seinfeld to come on TV so I could tape it onto a blank VHS.
I was definitely not the girl who owned a frilly scrapbook with the words ‘Dream Day’ written on the cover with glitter glue. But now I have the equivalent of that scrapbook on my laptop, just waiting to be filled with inspo photos from the Spring/Summer 2017 Monique Lhuillier collection.
So why the hell have I spent a sickening amount of hours, all through my twenties, planning a wedding that is not actually real? I like being single! (Honestly. I’m not saying that while my eye twitches in panic.) When you’re single, you can take your laptop to the toilet without judgement. It’s heaven.
So while I’m not desperate for a wedding, the Inception-level cave of frilly shame in ‘Rosie’s Tax Invoices’ would suggest otherwise. And in trying to understand this humiliating part of myself, I turned to the only person one should turn to when attempting to understand the innermost depths of one’s psyche: Oprah.
Oprah is the god I pray to, because I’m not religious and I like to make fun of myself as an insufferable, clueless white lady who is convinced that Oprah has all the answers. The kind of lady who reads Eat Pray Love and puts on activewear to pick up her kids from ‘self brand development class’ and/or ‘past-life soul therapy’. Don’t get me wrong; I think Oprah probably does have all the answers. I also think it’s funny for a billionaire to say that you can ‘manifest’ anything into your life, when manifesting for her would simply mean buying the thing she would like to manifest. (Although. . . what if Oprah manifested the things she wanted by becoming a billionaire? Whoa. Maybe she is just actually the greatest manifester of all time? Ignore my doubts. She is a holy genius.) Also, I just love her because I watch TV and think I’m important and she’s on TV and tells me I’m important.
When I approached my humiliating flaw the way I imagined Oprah would, it forced me to self-reflect, and imagine my problem as an inspirational Instagram quote on a nature background. That’s when I had a rare moment of profound sincerity.
I’m not looking forward to my wedding day; I’m looking forward to the days that come after the wedding day. I’m looking forward to having a partner who I love and who loves me and who thinks I’m funny. I’m looking forward to having little babies who I can teach to play the Super Nintendo that I will never throw out. I’m looking forward to putting the kids to bed and curling up with a glass of wine with a person who makes me laugh. I’m basically looking forward to being able to create the family that I never had. A family that feels secure and stays in one place and doesn’t end with screaming and police and foster homes and anxiety. I would really, really just like to find someone who feels like home.
And to me, in the sad, cliché ‘had a tough childhood’ part of my brain, my wedding day symbolises the official start of all that, and that’s why I have a folder on my computer that is so intense in its level of embarrassment, I would actually rather be caught doing a microwave popcorn foot tampon sex thing than have anyone ever open it.
I’m not about to settle though, as much as I would love to find love. I immediately delete people on Tinder who have the words ‘gym’ or ‘Big Bang Theory’ in their bio. I once broke up with a guy who tried to mansplain to me the best and safest way for women to give birth (‘at home, no drugs’ – I wish the future mother of his children the best of luck while she haemorrhages on the couch because she was forced to give birth like she was living in an isolated farm town from the 16th century).
I can’t wait to find the person who is my home, but I’m not going to latch on to whatever person wants the job. I’ve tried that before, and it is empirically proven to always end with me sending embarrassing, desperate texts while having a drunken meltdown. I’ve thrown my phone across the room in morning-after horror enough times to know: it’s better to be single than to settle with the wrong person. Get to the place where you want to find love, but don’t need to find it. It’ll save you from feeling like you have to be patient with the guy who says that expecting him to message back within twenty-four hours is ‘too much pressure’.
My time as a single lady helped me figure out what my nonnegotiables are when it comes to the kind of partner I would like to find. Non-negotiables like the following:
1.Are you okay with the fact that I don’t know how to cook and I have no intention of learning how to cook?
2.Do you promise not to question me when I insist ‘the dishes need to soak’?
3.Will you also then accept that ‘the dishes need to soak’ is code for ‘I would like you to do the dishes’?
4.Are you capable of putting the toilet roll on the toilet roll holder and not just on top of the toilet? Because I’m not and we’re not savages.
5.What are your thoughts on vacuuming? My thoughts are that I hope the person I love doesn’t mind doing it.
6.Are you comfortable not questioning my decision to watch fourteen hours of television on a Saturday, and do you promise not to ever say to me, ‘But it’s a beautiful day outside!’?
7.Can you accept that each pile of clothes you see on top of places like the treadmill and my desk is actually part of a complex wardrobe system that only I understand?
8.Do you acknowledge that my taste in television is the superior taste and we will therefore watch only what I deem worthy?
9.Do you accept my flawless theory that towels don’t need washing because you are already clean when you get out of the shower?
10.Can you make computers work? Because I don’t understand them, except for their television streaming capabilities. And memes.
Basically my non-negotiables involve me not doing housework and getting to watch whatever TV I want, so it seems I may just be looking for a tech-savvy maid.
Oh, and I also have one other really major one that I cannot compromise on. I figured it out during my ye
ars spent in relationships, and I now know, for both my mental and physical comfort, that this non-negotiable is essential:
I need to be able to fart in front of my boyfriends.
I just do.
In fact, I consider it a sign of true love. If you can find someone who makes you feel comfortable enough to let rip at will, then you, my friend, have found a love for the ages. Don’t ever let it go.
I once had a boyfriend who refused to acknowledge that women have any kind of bowel function, gas or otherwise. The idea of anything other than a perfumed stream of glitter piss coming out of me when I sat on the toilet was abhorrent to him. Actually, I think the fact there was a toilet in my house at all made him uncomfortable.
But farting was his major kryptonite. He couldn’t handle any kind of air coming out of a female’s bum – and it stressed me out so much I ended up with a serious and legitimate case of fart poisoning (an obviously real condition afflicting women with judgemental partners all over the world).
I discovered his phobia one night when the two of us were sitting in bed watching TV together and an involuntary fart burst out of me before I could stop it. I thought it was kind of a cute fart, to be honest. It certainly wasn’t one of those suspicious ones that make you worry about a person. There’s no way it could be considered close to ‘shart’ territory, let’s put it that way.
Just a little pop that I wasn’t expecting, which I didn’t think twice about and immediately laughed off.
My boyfriend did not share my nonchalance about the situation.
His whole body went rigid. His head slowly and dramatically turned towards me, a look of disgust on his face that should really be reserved for somebody who just got busted doing a microwave popcorn foot tampon sex thing.
‘What?’ I asked, a little taken aback.
My question was met with horrified silence.
He turned his head away from me (still slowly, still dramatically), and sat for a moment, staring straight ahead, in what appeared to be disbelief. Then he snapped into action. He got out of bed and, without saying a word, walked to the bathroom and washed his hands. HE WASHED HIS HANDS. Because I farted.
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