The first lie I told at college wasn't a grand one. It wasn't a fake name or a fake past. It wasn't even said out loud. It was the lie I told myself the first time I walked across campus and thought, This is freedom.
Freedom sounds cinematic when you've been craving it. It sounds like wide-open space and clean air and finally being allowed to breathe. In practice, freedom is a stranger. It doesn't greet you with a handshake and a plan. It simply stops holding you in place.
On my second day, I ate breakfast alone in the dining hall, surrounded by hundreds of people who seemed to have already found their groups. A table of athletes laughed like they'd known each other for years. Two girls compared schedules and talked about a professor by first name as if the semester had already happened and they were remembering it.
Back home, it would have bothered me. In a town that small, eating alone read like a problem. Someone would have asked if you were okay, which was a way of asking what was wrong with you. Here, no one cared. Here, I could be invisible.
I should have enjoyed that. Instead, I felt raw, like someone had stripped away the familiar layers of expectation and left me standing there without skin. It was then I realized freedom felt unstable. After a lifetime of fitting a mold, suddenly I had nothing to shape me. It was dizzying and terrifying.
I walked back to my dorm with my hands in my pockets and a sense of irritation I couldn't name. It was the same irritation I'd felt my whole life, only sharper now that I had something to compare it to.
Back home, people assumed I was going to be good because my parents were good. They assumed I was going to be steady because my father was steady. They assumed I would be kind because my mother was kind. If I behaved differently, they wouldn't have asked who I was becoming—they would have asked what had gone wrong.
In that kind of world, you don't get to discover yourself.
You get to perform yourself.
At college, no one performed me back at me. No one offered me a script.
Which meant I had to write my own.
That should have been exciting. I'd wanted it for years.
So why did it feel like standing at the edge of something deep and dark, peering down, wondering how far it went?
That afternoon, I went to the campus library because libraries were safe. They were the same everywhere: quiet, orderly, full of rules that didn't require you to explain your feelings.
The building smelled like paper and cleaning solution and the faint, dusty sweetness of old carpet. I walked past rows of computers and study rooms and shelves packed tight with books that looked like they'd never been opened.
On the second floor, I found a corner table tucked behind a tall shelf. It wasn't hidden, exactly, but it was out of the way. It felt like a place you could exist without being watched.
I sat down, pulled out the cheap spiral notebook my mother had slipped into my bag, and stared at the first page.
It was blank in a way that felt accusatory.
I'd written the date the night before. The date, my name. Now, I wrote next to it:
No one knows me here.
That sentence made my chest loosen, just a little, like unbuttoning a collar. But it also made something else curl inside me—something that felt uncomfortably like hunger. I tried to write the next line. My pen hovered. Nothing came.
I wasn't a dramatic person. I'd never been the kid who wrote poems on napkins or scribbled lyrics on the backs of math assignments. I'd been the kid who did what was expected and got praised for it. Sitting there, I realized I didn't know how to describe myself without using the language other people had always used for me.
Good. Smart. Reliable.
Those words didn't feel like mine. They felt like tags on a shirt I'd grown out of, but still desperate to fit into. So instead of describing who I was, I started describing what I'd never had.
Space.
Silence.
The ability to change without an audience.
That's when the writing started to come, not in some beautiful flow, but in blunt, frustrated fragments.
Everyone at home thinks they know me.They don't.They know the version of me that behaves.
I stared at that sentence until I could admit, privately, what it meant. I wasn't angry at my parents. I wasn't angry at the town. Not exactly. I was angry at the way being known could become a cage. My mother called it love. My father called it character. My teachers called it potential.
I called it pressure.
A laugh erupted somewhere behind me, loud enough to bounce against the quiet. My shoulders tensed automatically, like noise might mean attention. I looked up. A group of students walked past my table, talking and laughing as if the library were just another hallway. One of them glanced in my direction and then away again without pausing.
I felt something shift—subtle, but real. No one was looking at me here. No one was measuring whether I was living up to what they believed I was. I could be different today than I had been yesterday and no one would file it away as "Evan acting strange." Because to them, I wasn't "Evan." Not in the loaded hometown sense.
I was just another face. It was the first time in my life I'd been granted that kind of neutrality.
And it hit me with a strange question:
If no one expects anything from me, what do I want to be?
That night, I tested it. With a detail.
My roommate, Drake, had made friends quickly. He introduced me to them in the hallway with the same casual confidence he used for everything. "This is Evan," he said, like it was enough information to include me.
A tall guy with a baseball cap stuck out his hand. "I'm Lucas," he said. "Where you from?" It was a normal question. Harmless. I could have answered truthfully: a small town with one stoplight and a grain elevator, a place where everybody knew my parents and called me "sweetheart" in the grocery store.
But I heard, with sudden clarity, what that answer would do. It would immediately place me in a category. Small-town kid. Nice. Naïve. Probably homesick. Probably wholesome. I didn't want to be filed away.
So instead I said, "Near the river," because it was both true and vague. Lucas nodded like it made sense. "Cool, cool. You play anything?"
I didn't. Not really. I'd tried guitar once because my uncle played. I'd been mediocre. I'd quit. Still, I heard something else in that question: an invitation to define myself.
And for the first time, I realized defining yourself could be… flexible. "Used to," I said, shrugging more out of the uncomfortability of lying than anything else. "Guitar."
Drake looked at me, surprised, but he didn't challenge it. He didn't know my history well enough to contradict it. Lucas grinned. "Nice. We've got a jam thing sometimes. You should come."
I smiled back and said, "Yeah, maybe," and something in me sparked—not pride, not exactly, but a quiet thrill. Not because I'd fooled them. Because I'd been accepted into a version of myself I got to create. Back home, identity was slow. It was built one day at a time in front of people who remembered every mistake you'd ever made. It was based on family liniage, as if personality was a hand me down.
Here, it could be assembled in minutes. I walked back to my room afterward with my pulse slightly elevated, like I'd done something reckless. And the worst part was: I didn't feel guilty. I felt… curious. Excited.
I returned to the library the next day and wrote about it like a scientist documenting an experiment.
Observation: People accept whatever you offer them first.If you say it confidently, it becomes true.They don't question it because questioning is social friction, and most people avoid friction.
I paused, pen hovering. That sounded colder than I meant it to sound. I wasn't trying to manipulate anyone. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I was trying to find a way to exist without being pinned down.
I wrote another line, slower this time.
At home, I was one version of Evan.Here, I could be many versions and still be Evan.
That felt honest. It also felt like the beginning of something I didn't fully understand. As the days passed, I noticed myself doing it more. Not big lies—just adjustments. Little recreations.
With one group, I was quieter, more thoughtful. I listened more than I talked, and they treated me like I was deep.
With another, I leaned into humor I didn't even know I had, and they laughed like I'd always been the funny one.
In a study group, I spoke up confidently about material I was only half sure about, and no one questioned me because I sounded sure.
Every time it worked, I felt that same small spark. A mix of excitment, encuragement and the thrill of getting away with something only you know about. If people could accept multiple versions of me, maybe I wasn't trapped in any of them.
Maybe I could finally discover who I actually was. Maybe life would not have to be dull, basic, and boring. I wouldn't have to just be "small town Evan." I could be any Evan at any time. That's what I told myself.
In the journal, I began making lists—because lists were structure, and structure was comfort.
Things that make me seem confident:
looking people in the eye
asking questions instead of answering them
speaking first
Things that make people assume you're trustworthy:
steady tone
small self-deprecation
admitting one harmless flaw so they believe everything else
I stared at that last line for a long time. It wasn't something I'd been taught. It was something I'd figured out by watching. The realization made my stomach twist. I hadn't started this to be deceptive, but I felt it and I did not like how it sat on my chest and made it difficult to breathe.
I closed the notebook, suddenly uneasy, and looked around as if someone might have seen what I'd written. No one was looking at me. No one cared. That was the freedom, and freedom could be terrifyingly unstable.
A week into classes, I started hiding the journal outside the dorm room. I was painfully aware that if Drake, or anyone in any of my social circles discovered it in my possesion, I'd be labled as something much worse than "the nice guy." I hid it out of need, out of desire to continue this new found freedom and the sick need I started to develope to see how far the lies could go.
At first, I tucked it behind books on my shelf, then under my mattress, then in the bottom of a drawer. None of it felt secure. The places were public space, so I would not be tied to it if discovered. There were more than one Evan in this place afterall. But finding it meant I'd have to start over and even just a week in, I felt a deep desire to keep what I felt was my research.
Despite knowing most people here did not pay any mind to me, I constantly felt watched. It wasn't rational. I didn't have enemies. I knew no onecared about watching me however, I'd spent my whole life being watched, and now that the watching had stopped, my body didn't know what to do with the absence.
One afternoon, while I was in the library, I reached for a book on the top shelf and noticed one of the ceiling tiles above it was slightly misaligned. Not hanging loose—just enough that the edge wasn't flush. I stared at it like it was a solution someone had left behind on purpose. A hiding place.
The idea made my pulse tick up again, the same way it had when I'd said "guitar" with a straight face and watched it become true. I checked around. No one was near my corner table. The floor was quiet. I stood on the bottom shelf like a kid being reckless, reached up, and pushed the tile gently.
It lifted. A hollow space yawned above it—dusty, dark, empty. A ridiculous thought flickered through me, immediately followed by a more honest one: If I hide it here, it stays mine. I waited a full minute, just listening. No footsteps. No librarian voice. No attention.
Then I slid the journal up into the space above the ceiling tile and eased it back into place. When I stepped down and looked at the shelf, you couldn't tell anything had changed.
The journal was hidden and withit, so was the proof that I was doing something strange. I sat back at my table and exhaled slowly. For the first time in my life, I understood the appeal of secrets and lies. That small hidding place made me feel untouchable, as if I had an invisable armor around me that no one would ever be able to discover who I truely was. How could they when I didn't even know who I was?
That night, I drew the first crude doodle in the margin of the journal. I didn't plan it out. My pen just moved, almost absent mindedly. I'd been watching an old cartoon cat chase an annoying little mouse around. So that is what my pen drew. A cat. A mouse. Both badly drawn. Both locked in a chase that went nowhere.
I stared at it, amused. It looked childish. It also looked like the truest thing on the page.
I don't know who I am, I wrote beneath it.But I know I hate being trapped.
I hesitated, then added one more line.
Maybe the chase is the point.
That night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling of my dorm room, listening to Drake breathe on the other side of the room. I told myself I was simply adjusting. Discovering myself. Reinventing what I'd never been allowed to be back home.
I told myself it was harmless. I told myself I deserved it.
And somewhere in the dark, beneath all the rational explanations, a quieter truth waited—patient and hungry:
I liked how easy it was. I liked how quickly people believed what you gave them.
I liked that I could say, "Hi, I'm Evan," and decide, in that same breath, who Evan was.
I fell asleep with that thought settling into me like a seed.
Just a possibility. A door.
A chase for the excitment my life had always lacked.