Affair with a lying co-worker turns into a nightmare

[MikeN]

Honesty seems to be a hard thing to come by these days. It’s quite elusive in fact and is often camouflaged with the most well thought lies. It should come as no surprise that I know a person who has turned this sort of behavior into an art form. Round and round she goes and where the lies stop nobody knows.

 

It’s interesting to note that I had quite a sordid relationship with her and yet still retained my sanity enough to tell the story. Avigail was a charming delight to everyone she met. She always seemed to know the right things to say at the moment. Never at a loss for words, her timing was impeccable to say the least. I can’t imagine knowing a more detailed description of such a devious fanatic.

 

We started out being casual friends; co-workers actually, soon enough things got more intense with Avigail and I and our New York workplace became the scene for a regular array of decadent displays of enjoyment. She shared with me how terrible her home life was and that she was incredibly unfulfilled and neglected. Little did I know at the time that this was so very far from the truth. She even managed to infer that her husband beat her with regularity, of course there were no signs of this and she stated those things with little or no emotion.

 

As we got to know each other better, it was clear that this relationship would be anything but simple. I can’t possibly count how any times she repeated the same stories about specific co-workers. They were not favorable in the least and I could see and hear from their interaction that she had a vendetta against them. These types of harsh words were not limited to co-workers but also included her boss.

 

Luckily for me, I knew these people well and immediately realized that they were all lies. It came back to me after some investigation that she was merely jealous for they had done spectacular work which she could never achieve. It was even clear that Avigail had issues with other women primarily the ones who she thought were prettier than her or more well put together. Through this all, however, I stayed close with Avigail as there still appeared to be some redeeming value to our friendship.

 

But as the months went by it was clear that our friendship would require a great deal of patience and blind faith on my part. Still I gave it a go and we moved forward. As time passed we somehow became more intimate but on a purely innocent level. We talked about anything and everything and I was amazed at the various topics she could comment on.

 

I still felt though that some and actually most of the things she said concerning her varied knowledge were not actually true and my curiosity proved this. Why would somebody need to lie about so many things, I wondered, you could just say I don’t know or even look up the information. Nevertheless we trudged on and she would always in work-related interactions pick everyone’s brain and even peek over their shoulder to get the answers instead of finding them out for herself. I learned later on that she had even taken the credit for some spectacular work that a group of others did and also made a habit of blaming her mistakes on unsuspecting victims.

 

It is abhorrent for e to be repeating these things but I felt I must get them out before I exploded. Her far fetched claims included the ability to create works of art and write the most interesting of articles but what she failed to mention is that in the process of doing these things, she plagiarized other people’s hard work. Still, she was very good at making herself appear honorable and caring and I too, of course, was taken in by that appearance. I can tell you now that there is nothing she has told me that was not a lie.

 

I think the term for that given the events and demeanor that surrounded them is pathological liar. Of course, I am no expert just a lowly professional who observes behavior in his work, but there were strong indications that she is most likely a sociopath. I got to the point where I could no longer continue this sordid affair and tried to break it off with her; with that she turned into this unimaginable monster and stalked me relentlessly. She would call my home, email non-stop and also claim that I had physically hurt her in some way to our co-workers and anyone who would listen.

 

It got so unbearable that I was forced to switch jobs in order to escape from Avigail. That worked for a time and then finally it seemed that she latched onto someone new and after months of this ordeal I was finally free from this nightmare and sociopathic beast. What amazed me the most about her is that though all of this, and I later found out, that at the time of our encounters she had a husband and a twin baby boy and girl.