At some important point during my formative years, I accidentally demonstrated a mildly surprising fortitude against spicy food.

It wasn’t anything objectively amazing—more something to be quietly admired for a moment and then forgotten about forever. But it was the first time I had displayed any sort of discernible talent, so the incident was completely blown out of proportion.

The next day at work, my father exaggerated the story slightly.

Unfortunately, one of my dad’s coworkers, Mike, had built part of his identity around his ability to withstand spicy food. Not wanting to be outdone by a child, he attempted to one-up my father’s claims.

Things escalated quickly, and before the end of the day, my dad had inadvertently volunteered his eight-year-old to face off against a forty-five-year-old man in a hot-sauce-eating challenge.

I think my mom wanted to be against the idea. She made some cursory attempts to oppose it, but . . .

. . . maybe it would be good for my self-esteem.

They decided to approach me about it.

I considered the question carefully.

My competitive drive hadn’t fully developed yet, but, like most children, I yearned for attention and approval, and I couldn’t exactly afford to be picky about how I earned it.

The competition was scheduled for the following Friday. Mike arrived with his weapon of choice—a habanero pepper sauce. We agreed that we would eat increasingly large amounts of the sauce until one of us couldn’t take the pain anymore.

I remember being really surprised at how badly the sauce burned. But it was the first time I had ever really had the chance to win anything, and I wanted my parents to be proud of me. I’d rather allow the insides of my mouth to be liquefied than face the shame of defeat, so I carried on as if I didn’t even notice the fiery agony engulfing my face.

Mike became visibly uncomfortable pretty early on.

Still, his pride held out for an impressively long time. But he was an adult who possessed other skills that he could fall back on in the event of defeat, and that made him weak.

His resolve cracked just after the sixth spoonful.

Everyone was really impressed with me. Maybe I actually did have some sort of special ability. Enjoying their admiration, I showboated a bit.

And for that one tiny moment, I got to feel like a superhero. If it had all ended there, it would have been one of the great triumphs of my life.

But it didn’t end there.

My “talent” became a sort of party trick—something my family would pull out when the conversation died down at dinner.

I never objected because I didn’t want to come clean and ruin everyone’s perception of me as some sort of hot sauce savant.

Over time, the misunderstanding expanded. My family began to legitimately believe that my favorite thing in the world was hot sauce. If I “forgot” to put hot sauce on my food, they helpfully reminded me. They consistently brought home newer, spicier, weirder hot sauces for me to try. For Christmas that year, Santa gave me a whole case of hot sauce.

Being a child, I was devastated that a potential toy had been replaced by those bottles of painful torture, but I couldn’t let anyone know. At that point, I was starting to feel more and more at peace with the idea of admitting failure, but it was too late. I’d been pretending for long enough that it would be too weird and embarrassing to explain myself. There was no choice but to maintain the illusion.

But every time I pretended to love the stuff, it became a bigger part of my identity within my family. Distant relatives and family acquaintances related to me almost entirely through my perceived infatuation with hot sauce.

And through it all—no matter how ridiculous and tangential it got—I never told them the truth.

But here it is:

Dear family members and people whom my family members led to believe I adored hot sauce with the fiery intensity of ten thousand jalapeños: I lied. It was all an act. I only like hot sauce a normal amount, and that’s after twenty years of acclimating myself to it. You may never understand what would possess a person to lie about something so insignificant for over twenty years, but all I can say is that it spiraled and I was every bit as confused about it as you probably are now.