I really try not to tell lies in my life, but there have been times when certain things happened to me that I just knew the only way I was getting out of this was to tell a well-crafted lie.
One of these moments happened years ago after my dad had asked me to travel back home and had sent me money for the transport fare. It was during my gambling days, and back then, I would usually withdraw money as cash in order not to be tempted to gamble with it.
But this money was huge at the time, and it didn't feel right to go withdraw it, so I had left it in my account and promised myself not to touch it until I was ready to go buy the bus ticket to go back home.
Well, fast-forward to that night, and I found myself gambling with it. The plan had been to use a bit of it to gamble, in order to win enough money that I could pay for both my transport fare and to buy other things too. But these things never go as planned, as it didn't take long for me to find myself with no money left.
I had used the whole thing to gamble and had nothing left on me. Luckily for me, I had an app that I used to save money back then. This app allowed its users to lock their money in it for a specific amount of time before getting it released on the agreed date. So, the money I had saved at the time was exactly the same money that my parents had sent to me for transportation. The only problem was that that money wasn't getting released until later that month, about three weeks away from the date I was supposed to travel.
So I needed a story to tell my parents why I could no longer travel on our agreed date, and that was when I came up with the brilliant idea to lie to them, to tell them that I had mistakenly locked away the money they sent to me for transport and that I wouldn't be able to come back home until the money got released.
I still remember how upset my dad was when he heard it, and I could imagine how much more upset he would have been if I had told him the truth. Thankfully, he had sent me more money, which I had immediately used to get the bus ticket.
And when that money eventually got released, I had sent it back to him, and everything felt like nothing really happened, when, as a matter of fact, a lot did.
That day, the day I lost all of that money, was probably one of the scariest days of my life.