The Lies We Tell Until They Stick

At some point between 18 and 25, I realised the most dangerous thing about growing up isn’t heartbreak or failure it’s how easily your own lies start sounding like truth. You begin with harmless self-soothing: I’m fine, just busy. I don’t care if he didn’t text back. This degree will sort itself out. And then one day, you say it so often that your nervous system files it under “facts.”

We call it fake it till you make it, but no one warns you that it works both ways. You can fake confidence till you become confident or fake numbness till you become hollow. You can fake not caring until you genuinely forget what caring used to feel like. It’s psychological muscle memory. The more you rehearse an emotion, the more your brain wires it in.

In psych, there’s something called cognitive dissonance: the discomfort between what you believe and what you do. The brain hates that gap, so it closes it. You say, “I’m happy,” enough times while quietly dying inside, and your mind starts to stitch together a version of you that seems okay just to stop the ache. It’s like lying to your reflection till the mirror stops arguing back.

I remember being 20, sitting in my college canteen, convincing myself I loved my major. Everyone around me was talking about their “dream companies” and “placements,” and I nodded along because admitting confusion felt like failure. I lied so well that even I believed it. Only later did I realise that the lie didn’t just protect me; it shaped me. It made me ignore curiosity, sideline creativity, and build a career blueprint for someone else’s version of success.

But here’s the strange part some lies helped too. When I said, “I can handle this,” during my first internship meltdown, I actually did. When I told myself I was capable of being alone after my breakup, I slowly learned to love my own company. So the tool itself isn’t evil; it’s the direction of the lie that decides whether it’s medicine or poison.

The 18-to-25 window is like software training mode. You install so many scripts about who you are, what you want, what love means, what success should look like and then spend the next decade debugging. We fake stability till we forget we’re scared. We fake ease till overthinking becomes a personality trait. We fake independence till asking for help feels like weakness. And one day, someone says, “You seem so chill,” and you nod, half-proud, half-lost, because you’ve become fluent in a language you invented to survive.

Social media makes it worse. We post curated truths until our offline selves start syncing with the grid version. There’s even a term for it identity drift when your self-perception bends to match your performance. You start believing in your own PR. The captions stop being aspirational and start being evidence. You wrote, “Healing era 🌿,” so now you have to act like you’re healed.

I think about this a lot in dating, too. You tell someone you’re “chill” because you don’t want to scare them off with sincerity, and then the relationship becomes a temple to that chillness. You can’t suddenly say, “Actually, I want more,” because the lie got tenure. The role you auditioned for became a contract.

So how do you undo a lie that’s been rehearsed into your bloodstream? I don’t think you can delete it you just have to overwrite it slowly. Start telling yourself better ones: I’m learning, instead of I’m lost. I care too much, and that’s fine. I’m trying to be honest, even when it costs me ease. The brain will protest at first it always does when you introduce new code but repetition rewires belief. It’s the same hack that got us stuck, used for escape.

Maybe that’s what growing up actually is: realising that “fake it till you make it” isn’t about pretending to be confident it’s about pretending to believe in a kinder version of yourself until it sticks. The bad news is that lies build walls fast. The good news is that truth, when repeated gently, rebuilds faster.

So here’s my working rule for this season of life: if I’m going to lie to myself, let it at least be in the direction of becoming softer, not smaller. Because between 18 and 25, everything you repeat becomes your architecture.

Choose your scaffolding wisely it’s what you’ll end up calling home.