The game is called 'Three Truths and a Lie.'
You’ve probably heard of it. It’s commonly used as a team building exercise, often with a new job or a college class. There are different variations: four truths and a lie, two truths and a lie, truth or fiction.
The idea is simple: you state a number of facts about yourself, one of which is a made-up falsehood. It’s up to you to try to fool those playing the game with you, and up to those playing to try to guess the lie from your body language, tone of voice, and other clues.
I just played it during a video conference this week. I did pretty well - nobody believed someone actually live on a boat (truth), and they probably couldn’t envision a guy my size as a competitive swimmer in college (truth), but they all believed that I am a seasoned chef (totally false).
Let’s play. Choose the lie.
- "I have been the 'best man' at four weddings, and the 'man of honor' in one.”
- "In college, a professor once told me I was guaranteed an A and that I could stop coming to his class, because he'd seen me on TV during coverage on a homicide and felt that my experiences were worth more than anything he could teach me in class.”
- "It took me two extra years to graduate college, because I was raising my friend's teenage son."
- "A GED class teacher once stopped by my car and said she had to meet me, because she'd never had one person that three different students had written about in the 'My Hero' essay she assigned as a practice for the exam."
If you noticed, I picked four things that, if true, might make me look pretty good.
Some of you know me personally, so you probably already know the answer.
For the rest, I don't want to spoil it, so I'll tell you the answer at the end of this entry.
I use the ‘Three Truths and a Lie’ example to illustrate a point.
Over Memorial Day Weekend I got a series of text messages from a member of our community who reads my blog and had seen my number on the 'contact me' page.
He was very upset, and needed someone in our community to talk to.
He said he had a few close friends he'd normally be able to talk to when he was upset, but they don't know about his love for diapers, and he was so upset he was afraid he would slip up and blurt out the word.
I told him to call me. I listened as he talked. I'd actually heard different variations of his story before over the years, but let him get it all out instead of interrupting with some attempt at sage wisdom.
Even as he and I were talking, I knew I'd be writing a blog entry about the topic.
My new diaper bro was angry, hurt, and despondent all at the same time. He's told me that he’s a college student, and throughout this year had been communicating with another college student who is also a member of our community. The two go to school on opposite coasts, but both are returning to their hometown for the summer, and they had plans to meet and hopefully hang in Huggies this summer.
That all changed this past Friday when li'l bro went on Facebook and found himself deleted by his friend.
At first he figured the kid was purging - first time going home to the fam after being away at college and all. He was disappointed, but felt like if he was patient the kid would eventually come around.
But then he noticed something: he and his local diaper bro still had a number of 'mutual friends' on Facebook.
A quick check of some other sites revealed that this wasn't a 'purge' - the kid had kept his accounts and a lot of his other ABDL friends, and had just unfriended one person across all the platforms.
Upset and wondering what he's done to warrant that kind of treatment, my friend reached out on Facebook Messenger, and then on some other places. He texted, as well. His messages were being read, but not responded to. He was being frozen out, and he didn't know why. It was driving him crazy.
Finally, the kid he'd hoped he'd get to bond with over ABDL finally texted him back.
He simply asked him to stop messaging him.
My friend texted back and said that he would, but he wanted to know what he had done to offend him.
The answer? Go ask "Daddy ________."
That was where I came into the conversation. My new friend was waiting for an answer as to what this other person could possibly have to share regarding the whole situation, and had already been waiting a while. He was beginning to suspect he wasn't going to hear any more from him.
He was venting to me, explaining that he barely knew this other person, a local daddy who he'd talked to online briefly during the fall semester. They had talked about meeting up during a break, but my new friend had gotten cold feet when he realized that the guy was going through his Facebook friends and adding some, including some of the 'vanilla' ones. He had set his friends to private, prompting the daddy to remark about it the next time they talked, something about "keeping secrets”.
This kid wanted me to know that he hadn't flaked, but that he had told him he wasn't ready to meet. Secretly, he said, he knew he didn't want to meet the daddy anymore. He told me Daddy didn't take it well, sending a couple of nasty messages in the days that followed, including one threatening to tell other local ABDLs bad things. Now, he says, this guy had somehow inserted himself into what my friend expected was going to be a real friendship/relationship over the summer, and whatever he said had effectively ended it.
The kid was upset.
"This guy doesn't even know me enough to be able to share anything bad about me!" he kept telling me. "He doesn't even KNOW me!" was the refrain.
I did my best to calm him, and I shared some of my story with him.
This actually happens to me on a fairly regular basis, and has been for the last decade or so.
I’ve been deleted by friends in the ABDL community more than once. People who have sent in pics to my blog, done Q&A’s, and all that - just one day, gone from my friends list.
At first I figured it was some of my political rants, or something else I posted.
At some point I realized it was more than that.
It’s happened more than once. Just happened a few weeks ago, in fact. Again lol.
Without going into so much detail that the names and places can be recognized, I'll try to explain...
It all began about ten years ago.
That was when I moved into a community that, on the surface, appeared to be filled with dope-ass diaperboys.
Before arriving I’d sent a bunch of messages out to people who looked like people I would want to meet.
Then I sat back to wait.
I was excited! All of these profiles on the diaper sites couldn't be wrong: Cwis was about to meet some cool-ass people and have the time of his life!
Woo hoo!
Except it wouldn't really work out that way.
I got my first lesson into how the diaper cliques work pretty early in, when the first person replied to my message to ask me not to message him… and said I was going to get him in trouble.
A bit perplexed, I responded in a way I wish I hadn’t: asking him if something was wrong with him, although not as nicely,
He wrote back, and I could see he was very serious. He mentioned something about getting kicked out of the house if people found out that we talked, and I envisioned him being homeless simply because I had dared send a message suggesting we meet. What the fuck was going on? I didn't message him again, but figured this was a one-off. Surely there was just something wrong with this dude, right?
The second time someone told me he wasn't allowed to meet me, just a few days later, I was beginning to sense a pattern.
Then someone told me that he wanted to meet me, but I had to swear I wouldn't tell anyone we had met, because his friends absolutely couldn't find out.
Seriously?
We did meet, for lunch in a nearby city. This is when I started to realize that there was an actual community, and that I was being frozen out of it for some reason.
The year was 2006. I spent the rest of 2006, 2007, and 2008 meeting a select few people - almost always people who didn't seem to know anyone else in our community, people new to the area or just visiting.
In 2007 I had been texting with and talking to a kid who would be moving to the area for college. He seemed like a nice kid, and he was adorable - as dope as anyone I've ever spoken with in our community.
I figured our friendship would continue to evolve over time, so when he suggested we meet up I told him we should hold off. I told him it was too many miles for him to drive so late at night, but truthfully I had gotten a sense he was maybe still not ready to fully embrace his little side, and I didn't want to do anything to take advantage of his momentary eagerness. After all, I reasoned, there would be plenty of time, right?
There wouldn't be, it turns out. He would get in with the local daddies a few weeks later, and our friendship would basically fall off.
My first few years would be like this for me: reach out to people and get rejected. Or get told that we could meet, but it had to be a secret. I honestly wasn't sure which was worse.
Through all of that I wondered what I had done to piss off these daddies so much. Nobody ever hit me up to tell me. They had never met me - really talked to me, even - but there was something about me that they didn’t like. I wondered what it was.
I started my blog in November 2008.
It didn't really start picking up readership for a while, but once it did I began to see a whole bunch of readers from my city in the analytics.
People in my local community were reading it.
They were reading stories about me growing up in diapers. They were reading about the big boy bucket, and abysitting sessions, and pampz-for-pay. They were reading all of my stuff and, I would soon find out, they were sharing it with each other.
Some actually found themselves becoming fans of my blog, and eventually - against the wishes of their daddy masters - they started to hit me up.
Some of the same people who had ignored my messages before, or had told me they didn't want to meet me, or had said that they wanted to but couldn't, actually began hitting me up asking if we could meet.
Sometimes they simply emailed me from a random email address, introducing themselves by their real names, probably hoping I wouldn't realize that they were the same person whose diaper persona had responded rudely to me on a diaper site or blocked me somewhere.
Other times they would just be straight up, telling me they had heard bad things about me before, usually from a source they didn’t seem to want to share, but felt like they had to get to know me personally after reading stuff that actually came directly from me.
(See where I'm going with this?)
More than once I would hear from people who, having recently gotten into a battle of wills with a local daddy, had decided to finally hit me up.
But it was too late.
I knew that the messages I was getting from locals were, at least in some cases, nothing more than attempts to forge a friendship with me to get revenge for some shitty treatment at the hands of a diaper daddy. Hang out with the person they don’t like, and piss them off in the process.
Part of me didn't want to be used like that, and part of me didn't want to do anything that would spoil their standing in the local community.
And, truth be told, I could never tell when the truth was being told.
The kid who told me that he’d met all of the local folks but they’d decided they didn’t like him? We almost met, but didn’t when I realized there was something off about his profile - he specifically stated he didn’t want to talk to daddies and was strictly DL. I asked him about that, and he told me he hand’t updated his profile in a while. When he sent me a Facebook friend request a few years later I saw, among his friends, all of the people he’d said didn’t like him. I guess they’d come around…
Another person told me he’d been trying to get in contact with me since he’d gotten into town but hadn’t been able to - for months, it seemed. Turns out he’d recently been kicked out of some daddy’s house after disobeying Daddy’s directives. He’d avoided conversation with me for so long because he’d not wanted to do anything to jeopardize his standing, but was willing to do whatever he needed to do to anger his daddy once it had been ruined. That, apparently, including meeting me.
One person I met when he came to my city as a visitor wanted to continue our friendship once he moved there permanently. In talking, though, I realized that gaining acceptance among the local community was pretty high on his list of priorities, something which would require he be on good terms with the local daddies. I’d already told him that I wasn’t ‘in’, but he hadn’t quite gotten it, I guess. I told him that we should hold off on hanging out again until he’d met the people he was hoping to befriend, and take things from there. He was understandably offended, and hasn’t talked to me since lol. He did alright for himself, though - I saw a picture of him smooching with a diaper daddy not too much later.
And so it goes.
Through the years my blog grew, and some of my blog entries touched people in different ways. Getting messages from people who had read something that connected with them was one of the best parts about writing this blog, and it was starting to happen more and more. Locals were no exception. There were times that what I can only imagine were amazing people from the local community would read my blog and feel compelled to hit me up, wanting to meet for coffee… wanting to be babysat… just wanting to meet.
But for each person who appeared genuine, there was another person who appeared to be trying to strike up a friendship to avenge some slight from a local daddy. And for each one of them, there were two or three other people who would let me know that some local fuck was talking shit about me again.
“Cwis is a friend collector - he doesn’t care about you, just adding you as a friend.”
“If you meet Cwis he’ll make you take pictures for his blog.”
And my favorite…
“Cwis is anti-social, and doesn’t really care about building the community.”
Seriously… what the fuck? The same people who did their best to freeze me out later alleging that I was the anti-social one.
“I’ve never even met these people,” I would say.
Sound familiar? It should.
It was almost funny, sometimes. Except even while it was happening to me I’d be getting messages from my readers, from my friends, from my city and others. They were experiencing the same thing I was. And I knew that some of them weren’t lucky like me, with dozens of ABDLs flying in and out of their city every year - being frozen out of their communities meant being isolated, being alone.
And that sucks.
I learned a lot through the years.
I eventually determined that I’d been frozen out of my local community because I had dared to reach out to individual members of the community one at a time.
I’d actually messaged people in every state between New York and the state I’d eventually moved to before I embarked on my 2006 ‘road trip’. That had included a few people who were, it appears, under the control of a few of the diaper daddies in the city I’d eventually move to. This, it seems, was an unforgivable offense.
Add to that the fact that I would eventually pay to put the kid I met in a nearby city on a bus to the Pacific Northwest. He’d been living with a daddy and “Daddy” was in the process of trying to move on to younger boys… he was afraid he’d be homeless soon, and he was tired of that life. He’d sworn to keep the bus ticket I bought him a secret (just as I’d been forced to promise to keep our lunch meeting a secret). Eventually, though, I think the word got out, and I’m guessing that didn’t help my standing much…
But by then I didn’t care. Because I learned things about some of the people who’d decided I wasn’t a “good match” for their clique, and it wasn’t cool. Most of it was detailed when a local kid got kicked out of the house and, in a fit of anger, sent me messages with a shit ton of info I’d never known. Those messages between us were later reviewed when he eventually returned to live with his Daddy - fights don’t last forever, after all. Fearing that I might publish the details on my blog, one of the locals later tried to blackmail me - ironically, by threatening to out the college student I’d once been close with, the same one I hadn’t spoken with since he’d cliqued up.
With friends like those…
Through my own experiences, and from hearing from so many others going through the shit they were going through over the years, I learned quite a few things about our community.
I learned that many cities have controlling diaper daddies. It certainly wasn’t unique to my own. He with the pool house makes the rules… and in some corners of our community, those rules will be followed, no matter how restrictive they are, because being excluded from the next pool party may just be the punishment.
I learned, too, that the lure of being a part of a group of diaper boys is strong - so strong that ordinarily good people will lower their standards, will overlook all kinds of shit in order to belong. I can’t tell you how many times people from across the country have hit me up out of anger, exposing some disgusting shit happening in their own corner of the community in the hopes that I may broadcast it on my blog, only to eventually return to the cliques that disgusted them so much.
In the end, we all just want to be accepted… we yearn to belong. Even if that means belonging to a clique lead by controlling diaper daddies who choose who gets to belong.
Our need to belong is even more intense when it comes to the ABDL lifestyle, I think, where every single connection we make tends to take on an even more significant meaning than just normal friendships. Which is why it sucks to be frozen out, to be excluded.
There are some cities out there that are lucky as fuck: they have amazing local ABDL organizers who are busy setting up munches and other events that are inclusive to the community. These guys do their best to keep the cliques from forming - they ensure that everyone is included, and that everyone is treated with respect.
I know that because I hear from people in those communities, too. I see them on the ‘secret groups’ on Facebook, posting announcements about DiaperActive events, and diaper parties at the Eagle, and Pups and Pals events in other cities. And I see pictures on Fetlife and other sites from these events. I even get invited to some of them, despite living halfway across the country or, in one case, on the other side of the world. Love being included in that stuff.
I’d be willing to bet that in some of those communities, still, controlling diaper daddies lurk in the shadows, ‘diaper snipers’ trying to siphon off what they can from the community.
Fuck them.
Fuck the ones who did it to me.
And while I’m on the subject, fuck anyone who’s ever deleted me from their list of Facebook friends to try to please a controlling diaper daddy.
In fact, fuck anyone who’s ever deleted anyone from our community from Facebook, or anywhere else, to try to please someone else.
Connections in our community are far too important to treat like bargaining chips in the battle to belong.
When my new friend called to share his story with me he mentioned that all three of the central characters read my blog. I’m hopeful that they each get to see this entry, at least.
And I’m hopeful a few other people get to see it, too. If you deleted me from Facebook just before your trip to visit some diaper daddies in my former city, I see you. If you added a diaper daddy and then removed me from your friends a day or two later, I see you.
During my nearly 10 years of blogging I’ve met so many amazing people - independent people who don’t let anyone tell them who they can and can’t be friends with.
Those are the people who make this community worth belonging to.
The people who exclude people who don’t bow down or kiss the ring? And/or the people who let themselves be controlled so easily? Their actions say far more about them than they do about me. Or, if you’re experiencing anything like what I went through, you.
When you freeze someone out who you don’t even know, you don’t know what kind of person you are missing out on.
When you don’t meet someone because you’re afraid of not being invited to the next diaper overnighter, you have no idea what kind of friend you may have given up.
If you delete someone from Facebook because of some shit some daddy told you - especially if said daddy doesn’t even know the person they’re talking shit about - you have no clue what you may have just given up.
In a community where nearly every single connection I’ve made has become what I expect will be a lifelong friendship, I feel sorry for some of you… you’re giving up so much.
As for the three truths and a lie…
They're actually all true.
"Not fair!” you may be saying.
If so, though, you’re missing the point.
The "lie" would be just about anything you might have heard about me from people who have never met me… from people who don't know me.
Those of you who were able to get to know me already knew the answer to this ‘game’.
Those of you who weren't allowed to get to know me over the years missed out.
If you’ve frozen someone out at some point during your time in our community, it’s never too late to reach out to them to apologize.
If you’ve hung out with people you knew were bad people just so you could belong to an ABDL group of some sort, it’s never too late to start having standards.
And if you’ve deleted someone on Facebook to try to please someone else, it’s never too late to hit that ‘friend’ button.
And if you’ve deleted someone because of some bullshit you’ve heard from a diaper daddy, it’s never too late to reach out to the person you’ve ghosted on and ask for the truth.
I know at least one person who is spending the first part of his summer break hoping that message will come through.
There’s a Part II to this blog entry, but it’s actually not something I’m comfortable publishing on my blog, so I haven’t.
I will say that, in writing this, I was able to tell my story without mentioning a single person.
I could call people out, but I’ve blogged since 2008 without doing that, and I won’t start today.
If someone has reached out to you to talk shit about me - someone who has never met me - you know who they are.
Otherwise, we’ll keep it anonymous.
Don’t let people like that control groups where you live, and our community will be better for it.
I missed out on what would likely have been some amazing friendships over the years, and that sucks.
If this keeps even one person from missing out on ABDL experiences that might not have happened otherwise, posting this will have been worth it.
