“After decades of this, I’d had enough awkward conversations, been laughed out of enough job interviews, rejected by enough friends, denied enough apartments, and had enough romantic possibilities poisoned that I decided maybe everybody else knew something I didn’t. Maybe their insistence that they’d been honest wasn’t just another lie; maybe it was somehow genuine. I attempted a new kind of lie-spotting, directed this time at my own understanding of other people, at what I told myself.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202101/the-man-who-wouldnt-lie