Hello everyone

Stats: 6'4 200lbs. Lifts: Bench Press 200lbs, Row 200lbs, OHP 125lbs, Deadlift 405lbs.

Lifts used to be much higher, but I’m currently recovering from a serratus anterior injury that had kept me away from lifting for a while. Also train BJJ a few times a week.

Reading: I've read all the sidebar content from the main RP sub. Have been through RPC sidebar a while ago, I used to come here a bit over a year ago as a non-participating lurker mostly but have a good overall understanding of the material.

Finances: Currently hold a good paying job in SEO/Digital Marketing at a mid-sized firm working 30 hours. I'm a couple months away from being done with my 2nd year of college, I'm going to double major in Digital Marketing/Information Technology as that's available in my university. Relative to my classmates, I'm well off because they're all still in the working in fast-food and seeking internships stage, whereas I was able to break into the industry a year ago and move my way up. This is a whole story on it's own, so I'll leave this as is for now. Additionally, I am fortunate to not have debt.

Additionally I've been building a small-business on the side, (content marketing) and after 8 months on the project am proud to say that I make around $75 monthly on it, which is almost nothing but it's all passive. One of my key goals is to add to this, and continue to pump out content to grow this. It currently has around 4k organic monthly visitors, with only a couple of monetized pages.

Okay, so here goes.

I have been praying, and working through the issue of being dishonest for a few years now, slowly improving but also taking steps backwards. Without giving a giant backstory, essentially I know exactly where this started. As a child, I was raised in a super conservative, fundamentalist Death Cult household, where I was badly beaten on a regular basis, and slowly developed into a liar, so as to avoid future beatings. Then, at the age of nine, my mom got liver cancer and died. I used these newfound lying skills to make up stories when my friends would ask me where she was, what she was doing, etc. It was overall awful, looking back on it, but that's where it started.

Those lies kept me afloat, and in safety, so I went with them.

Now, as an adult in my 2nd year of college, I still feel this issue coming back to haunt me now, and has nearly run me off a cliff.

Because of my father's success in his career, I felt tremendous pressure to live up to that. That's why I first got into my chosen field (digital marketing) in HS, and decided to lie on my resume in order to gain opportunities that I would not otherwise have.

For example, when I had no experience other than my own sites (which at the time only made about $10 a month), I lied on my resume, saying I was making $100 a month on that site, and then made up a long backstory about how I was actually a senior in college, and used elaborate detail when describing the relevant projects that pertain to this career field.

I put my resume out like that, and got my foot in the door with a paid internship. Great, I thought.

So I did that for 7 months, and then used the internship, and my own site, which had grown to $50 a month at the time in actuality, and put my resume out again, this time saying that my site made $400 a month. So now, I secured a few more interviews with real advertising firms, and still stated that I was a senior in college (while being a sophomore).

This medium sized marketing agency where I work now, thought it was amazing that I had done that, and decided I was overqualified for the position, and decided to give me a very solid paying position doing SEO for them, with the understanding that in 6-8 months (when I was supposedly going to graduate) that they would love for me to come on and work full-time for the company.

Now, this was bad enough for me to be crushing myself on a regular basis, because I know that although I can do the job, and do it well, that I lied to get the opportunity, and this only contributes more to the feedback loop I have that shows I'm becoming successful through lying.

As I have gone along, and in the months since I've been here, have absolutely fallen in love with the place. A few of my teammates that I work with on a regular basis are Christians, and have become close with me. I'm able to financially do pretty well, and can finally self-sustain, and survive without my immediate family, even while working part-time because the per-hour pay is much higher than what I've ever received before. This contributes to making my guilt even worse.

But this week, things took a drastic turn.

I found out that my little nephew, 9 years old, has cancer. I missed a couple of days of work as a result, and my co-workers went out of their way to take the time to talk to me about it, and tell me they're praying for us, etc. I am also going to be putting money forward for him to be getting the best treatment he can possibly get.

This was my first day back, and our we were giving a presentation to our CEO and at the end I gave him an update that our department got an email from a local newspaper who wanted to do a write-up on his role growing the company in such a virtuous fashion. He made a very eloquent response, turning it down and stating that he "doesn't want to let his left hand know what his right hand is doing."

Instantly, I realized he was a Christian, and then he and I had a great conversation about faith in the minutes that followed the presentation. It made me respect him way more, even more than I already did. He also specifically asked me about my graduation date, because the team is expanding, and he wants me to be able to step into a bigger role after graduation. I doubled down on my lie, and mentioned that I would be done at the end of the year, when in actuality, I have two years left, because I know that bigger role would give me the funds to be able to pay for the treatment, and also survive on my own.

So after thinking about this situation the past few hours, I can see several options here.

  1. I should have a sitdown with him, and am completely honest, with no expectations. ready to resign, speaking the truth about everything that I have done, and just explain the whole situation.
  2. I go and get another job, and respectfully walk away with no one being the wiser. At this point, I can definitely get another job with the experiences I have. It might not be as great a situation as the current one, but I can do that, and have updated my resume, and started applying today.
  3. Do nothing, continue the facade and risk being exposed in the future, as I try to balance a bigger work-role and going to school full-time, which could prove to be incredibly difficult. There's also the ominous fear that a promotion will trigger a more expensive, better background check and will prove that I don't have my degree yet. Perhaps an even more sinister situation is that I do nothing, and I succeed, thus continue to feed the corrupt feedback loop and mechanism which got me to the current point, continuing to lie.

Currently, I'm stuck between 1, and 2.

I did wrong, and I need to be better than that. Please share with me your thoughts on what you think should be done, brothers.

Best