On Lies

I want to start this article off with an apology. I'm sorry. I've lied to you.  At least, probably. Unless this is somehow the first article you've ever read, and you've never seen me say anything anywhere else, chances are that at one point or another I've told you a lie. And I do legitimately feel bad about it. I don't like lying. I very rarely do it in real life. I'd rather be brutally honest than lie. And yet, me, as Tarro, I lie pretty much all the time. 
 
I do it because I have to. At least, most of the time. As a zoo on the internet, especially one with some reach and a platform, I'm constantly stressing about people who would love nothing more than to find out my real life name, address, workplace, and then systematically ruin every part of my life. Hell, if any of them have enough reading comprehension to get past the first paragraph and a half, I'm probably going to get DM's from people who see this article and confirm my concerns. 
 
Now, I've been around the block once or twice. I understand how to generally keep myself safe on the internet. Very rarely do I ever post things about myself, when I do I try to keep it as general as possible. But, I've been around for more than two years now. Even if I maybe mention something about myself once a month or so, all of that starts to add up over time. Like a puzzle you're putting together without the box, each little piece helps to understand the whole a little bit more, and you don't need to be able to see the whole picture before you understand what you're looking at. 
 
Places like Kiwifarms delight in this kind of thing. It's almost like a game. And you can bet that Kiwifarms isn't the only one. I've seen documents written about me exactly like this, from people who have scoured my tweets, my messages in public groups, my articles, all to find another piece of the puzzle. 
 
Now, the obvious thing to do would just be to not give them anything. No details, no clues, no breadcrumbs. But that's hard. I'd dare say that if you're someone who's trying to actually create it's pretty much impossible. You can't say anything without saying something. If I tweet about my partner, people know I live with a dog. If I talk about the games I'm playing, people know I'm a gamer. If I tweet about going to a furry convention, people know I'm a furry, have enough disposable income to go to things, and that I'm generally connected to that scene. I could just tweet "Animals can consent!" over and over again, but that's both not very productive to the conversation, nor is it really that engaging for the audience. I (at time of writing) just put out a cover song for Zoo Pride Week 2024. It was really fun, people seemed to like it, but it told people a lot about me. It was a cover, so they can assume I'm a fan of the original artist, it has my voice, so they have at least an approximation of what I sound like (depending on how good they are at de-modifying it), it's made at least half decently so they know that I probably have experience creating music. Each of those pieces add up little by little. 
 
So, I want to create, I want to grow both myself and the community, what do I do? Well, that's where the lying comes in. If doxing is like putting a puzzle together, lying is like adding a piece from a different puzzle to the mix. Maybe it just causes a delay as they realize that that piece doesn't belong. But the best lies are ones that fit perfectly with the rest of the puzzle, putting a serious problem in recognizing the whole. And the thing is, lying isn't just good for adding misinformation, it's also good because it requires you to look at everything as if it *might* be a lie. 
 
Let's play a fun game. Two truths and a lie. If you don't know how it works, it's simple. I'm going to give you three statements. Two of them are going to be honest things about myself, and one of them is going to be a blatant lie. Your job is to guess which one the lie is. Ready? Let's play. 
 
1: I was born in Spain
2: I have two sisters and a brother
3: My real name is Claire
 
Have your guess? Locked in? How did you decide which one was the lie? Is it based off of intuiting the things that you know about me, and deciding which one is the most likely? Did you start with trying to identify a truth, or the lie? The whole game is based off of the understanding that there's only one lie and two truths, so just based off of basic math, if you can identify one of those one way or another, you have a much better chance with the rest. But, what if we made the game harder. What if I told you that there were actually two lies and one truth? What if I told you that they were all actually the truth? What if I told you they were all actually lies?
 
Putting together a puzzle when you have one piece that might be from a different box is a little annoying. Putting together a puzzle where there's another handful of pieces mixed in is hard. Putting together a puzzle when also there's five other puzzles in there somewhere, including the ever vital corner pieces, is ideally impossible. 
Except, here's the tricky part. For every extra piece, I need to tell a lie somewhere online in a public space. It needs to be seen for it to be used. There's unfortunately no way to lie to just the people that I want to see them. So, inevitably, there's often cases where I lie, and the wrong people believe me. Other zoos, even people that I would call my friends. 
 
Lies are a complicated thing. The more of them there are, the more that they grow, until everything is a lie. Say for instance on Twitter I say  "Wow, I love living in the city, it's so fun!" and then, in a Telegram group a couple weeks later I say "I'm so happy I live in a super rural area, I can't imagine living in the city." One of those might be true, or they could both be lies. And yet, if someone calls me on it, what am I supposed to say? To claim that either is a lie implies the other as the truth. But, to give away the truth as far as what kind of setting you live in is a huge piece of information. So, you take the safest option. To just lie again. You're now telling a double lie, confirming that your first lie was, in fact, not true, while also once again doubling down on a different lie. This sucks. And when you lie as much as I do, it gets harder and harder to try and keep everything straight. For every mistake that you make, the only solution is to just lie more. Until it's impossible to keep track of what you've told to who and where. 
 
I've even lied to people I would consider myself close to in private DMs. Sometimes I don't mean to. They ask me a question, and my instinct is just to straight up lie. It happens before I even think about it. At this point, if I'm going to tell the truth about something, even in private, it takes serious effort to go through with. Sometimes, though, I lie to my friends on purpose. I consider myself excellent at keeping secrets. I have some friends that are not. If I have a friend who I consider to be particularly loose lipped, or who might accidently reveal information about me, I might just lie to them because it's more socially palatable than just telling them "sorry I don't trust you enough to reciprocate information you feel comfortable giving me." The closest I've ever come to having real tangible information about me leaked was when a good friend of mine told something to someone else who they assumed knew it about me already. And I just can't have that kind of thing happening. So I lie.
 
Which, at the end of the day, is why I'm writing this article, and why it started the way that it did. With an apology. I'm sorry that I lied to you. From my closest of friends, to our weekly dear readers, to the people that just follow me on Twitter, even to the people that do legitimately hate me. I really wish I didn't have to. 
 
To the haters, I'm sorry. I wish I didn't have to lie so I could talk to you face to face. I try to be fairly human, but at the end of the day I'm just a raccoon on the internet. I wish that I could go to a convention and hold a Zoosexuality Q&A and really talk things out. I wish I didn't have to lie about my friends, or my family, so that I could dismiss your claims about my lack of relationships with other humans. I wish I didn't have to lie so I could show you just how happy my partner is. 
 
To the followers, I'm sorry that your impression of me might be different than I actually am. Sometimes I think about the idea that you could see a couple of my tweets, and have literally all of them just be lies, and yet still choose to support me. You choose to help me grow based entirely on things that I've said just to throw people off my trail. And I feel awful about that. I want you to be able to really know me, I want to earn your support, and when I get it based off of dishonesty it feels like I'm cheating. I'm scamming you. 
 
To our regular readers, I'm really sorry. These articles are supposed to be fun, informative little pieces of zoo community and culture. When I write an article, my goal is to share a piece of myself with you, whether that's my love of philosophy, my inner feelings on things going on in my life, or some kind of zooey angle based off of something I like. My advice to people looking to write something is to start with something you already love and just put a zooey spin on it. I've written 100 articles, if I gave away a piece of myself every time, that would be way too much out there. And so, sometimes I lie. Maybe it's just an anecdote, maybe a paragraph about something I've been through. Maybe it's whole articles with the premise of something that's happened to me. Honestly, this is the thing that I feel the worst about. I see this magazine as something near-sacred. Like a child. To taint it with lies makes me so sad, but unfortunately I know that there are those out there that read every article just looking to pick up those pieces, and so even here I have to lie. I do it as little as possible, in ways that impact the content as little as possible, but I'm not going to lie and say it hasn't happened. Hell, it's happened in this article. 
 
And to my friends, I'm sorry. I hope that you all know that it's not personal. Some of you out there are amazing people I would love to hang out with in person. But, on the internet when I'm Tarro and you're you and I'm thinking more about my own safety than I am about making a connection, I lie. I really really try to avoid lying to the people closest to me. If you're reading this and you're re-examining everything I've ever said to you, chances are that probably 90% of it has been true. But, in the interest of coming clean, I just wanted to apologize for the things I have told you that have been wrong. 
 
I hate living like this. I really do. But, I like to think that at the very least, everyone can understand why I do it. I'm so excited for the future, where I can just be myself with the world. I want to stop lying so badly. But we aren't there yet. And so, I'm going to lie in the future as well. I want to apologize for that pre-emptively. 
 
All I can do is hope that you know that in my heart I only want to do what's right, and that all of the lies are for the right reasons. 
 
Thanks for reading. 
 
 
 
 
Article written by Tarro (and not necessarily co-signed by the editors, Alissa has both hands raised and says in the words of the immortal Shaggy “It wasn’t me.” (August 2024))
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