The devil really is in the detail.

 

You can tell someone something true but if you leave out enough detail you can make someone assume something that is completely contradictory to the truth.

 

For example, if I were to tell you that yesterday I went to the beach, rode a horse along the sure and finished the night with a few beers you would assume I had an awesome day. That description is entirely true, except your assumption about it couldn’t be further from reality. Because going to the beach and riding a horse along the shore sounds fun and glamorous, while having a few beers sounds like I spent it at a trendy bar converted from industrial space.

 

If I leave out everything else and you don’t ask any follow-ups, you would walk away assuming my life was great and that I was a really fun person.

 

But the truth is much bleaker. Because yesterday was an absolutely horrid day.

 

For starters, my friend and I were under the assumption the beach we went to was the same one they filmed The Horses at. It wasn’t. But we only discovered that after driving nearly three hours to get there. That’s fine, because in the grand scheme of things it will at least make for a nice anecdote of wines as a forty-something and it made for a column entry (which you will get to read at a later date). And Present Me lives her life so that future Drunk Aunty Me will have inappropriate stories to tell family weddings, so that suits me fine.

 

The riding horses along the shoreline part makes you think my friend and I were galloping along bareback on white stallions. Like we were characters from some cheesy paperback novel or were swept up in a beachside romance in a tropical location. You picture sunsets, glistening ripped bods and flowing hair.

 

But the truth is less fabulous.

 

In fact, it was the most depressing, unsexy and awkward experience of my life (other than that time I had “movies and chill” while The Hills Have Eyes played on a laptop screen in a college room). We rocked up to meet our tour guide and saw five horses tied to a truck, each one looking sadder than the last. They were old, tired and tattered. It was a sorry sight. If they were people, they would be former child actresses who used too many recreational drugs, still bleached their hair and wore boob tubes at 56. You wanted to untie their ropes and tell them to run free, but they probably would have just stayed there because they knew the world was so dead it wasn’t any use over exerting themselves to explore.

 

The tour guide separated my friend and I, to which we weirdly didn’t protest, and put a very dull couple between us. We lined up like ducklings with the tour guide and friend at the front and myself and my misery at the rear. What was worse was that we couldn’t make fun of how shitty our situation was with each other because we were too far away to hear one another. There’s nothing worse than being in a shitty situation and not being able to complain about it. Complaining is how I process things, it’s a very effective coping mechanism. 

 

What resulted was 60 minutes of uncomfortable silence, with the tour guide occasionally stopping to tell us things about sand dunes and the age of the horses. The horses didn’t seem to like the water, so we didn’t get to splash around in the ocean on horseback – rather, we sat in our saddles feeling bad that the horses had to be near water at all. A collective guilt settled in as we felt culpable for contributing to the horses’ ongoing annoyance. When the tour guide stopped to take pictures of us, it felt like someone taking a picture of you not recycling or getting a selfie with a dead person in the background – it was wrong and we didn’t want photographic evidence linking us to this warm, steamy period bin of a situation.

 

But you couldn’t gleam that from my description of the day.

 

So while my day was awful, I can tell people I went horse riding along the beach over the weekend and they’ll think my life is better than theirs. It’s an excellent way of satisfying my irrational inability to lie and my desire to win the approval and admiration of people I don’t know very well.

 

I say things like “I had a big night” because it could mean a myriad of things. I could mean I drank champagne at a fancy restaurant and ended up on a yacht with T Pain. It could mean I danced for five hours straight before doing flaming shots and waking up on a bus to Coffs Harbour. You know, it implies you did something cool without being too specific. You can say “I had a big night” to someone and they could think you went wild when you really just bought a six pack of the cheapest beers with the highest alcohol content and watched a terrible horror movie about a killer leprechaun (which, incidentally, was Jennifer Anniston’s first major film role).

 

You can also say things like “I was a little seedy” in the same sort of context. You can communicate that you weren’t feeling the best without having to tell people you pooed so hard you felt dizzy or that you just lay on your unmade bed eating a whole bag of frozen mango for hours. Because it’s vague enough that it can mean anything. It’s all open to interpretation. And this open endedness really allows people to draw their own conclusions.

 

And if their conclusions happen to be more fabulous than reality, who am I to contradict that?