Thanks for that whole post — but the quote is incredible.

Wow. Nifty.

I thought I was supposed to be learning to be a person.

And, in my defense, I was. Rapidly.

(And these seemed like lessons worth learning, after all. Definitely better late than never.)

I was actually learning, or at least double-learning, how to look like one. How to present as one. (How to mask, if you wanna use fancy neurodivergo-talk.) This is an extraordinarily bad and slow way to learn about your humanity — but, in my life, no other attempts to mold me into a functional thing had worked, so. In this deathmatch we call ‘keeping up and not looking wrong,’ the smartest money, for us or anyone, would have been on [was and is on?] faking it.

What they don’t tell you are the downsides to faking it.

Here are the downsides to faking it.

Plowing Through (aka, Your Effect On Others)

A bit of work, here, on the theory of faking it:

First of all, not all faking-it is bad. The topic under discussion is faking humanity, because you don’t know humanity yet, because nobody taught you and it never made sense and now they literally expect you to have to organize pill bottles. Just, being alive. Whatever. Faking humanity until you learn humanity is a piss-poor way to develop a human; humanity should be learned, one way or another, by way of socialization and household influences along the way. Even if your parents are acting in perfectly good faith, if they’re acting inscrutably to you, a proper model is not developing. {{“Ooh, and now  ‘modeling,’” they say, munching popcorn. “Very therapy.”}}

Second of all, not all faking-it is born of equally-eternal circumstances; but, one way to ensure yourself a one-way ticket to faketernity is to exist in a state of unreactivity. More on this forever.

In this case, something that non-fakers do is read the room. (Fakers also learn to do this.) (Granted — many types of people don’t. Fakers do. That’s the point.) (It just takes them forty fucking years sometimes, because they might not learn to do it until someone says they should.)

“Hey, Beethoven!,” the guy in my flashback calls from across the alley. “Shut the fuck up.”

I stop playing my loud-ass piano, next to my apartment window, with the window open, next to his apartment window. It’s probably nine p.m. or so — some time before ten. I thought it was like ‘same as normal music rules,’ you know? I intuited it and didn’t double-check. Oh, and I have an upright piano in my apartment — no, I didn’t ask my roommates. They showed up in the living room one day and there it was. Visually, sonically, energetically, my imprint reverberates unavoidably throughout the walls of the five-person townhouse. I am an agent of chaos.

Plowing through their lives.

And I don’t realize it.

In that ‘hey, Beethoven’ moment, my previously-so-innocent feelings are broken and hurt — honestly, kinda devastated — and yet, the guy couldn’t have done my roommates a bigger favor. Lord knows, what he said was something I needed to hear.

And the guy didn’t know that I honestly just needed to hear it.

Which was the right guess, statistically speaking.

So I can’t even blame him.

I’m just late to the pary seeing myself, is all.

Which always hurts. It’s always embarrassing. It’s always another test on everyone’s patience.

It was always you being frustrating.

The previous example was chosen for its simplicity and low stakes, but it’s one of many. There’s a reason I only succeed when I’m on a team comprised of my friends: I’m... fucking weird, man! I have to work my own little way; I have to like who I’m working for; I have to want to help. (I do a good job on things! I swear! I’m just weird as fuck, okay... annnnd I have no general work-ethic, and I have no sticktuitiveness for anything I’m not interested in! I know how that sounds! Hey! Can-I-still-be-sympathetic-to-you!) (*pulls party popper into camera*) Hi! I’m being real. I’ve had a complete psychological breakdown because I’m convinced I’m going to die of skin cancer and hepatitis on the sidewalk, because I can’t make myself do things I don’t want to do. That’s how my story is going to end.

I can fake being all kinds of people. I can fake all kinds of skillsets. I can fake-everything, now.

I plow through. But plowing? In an ongoing fashion?

No. The time starts itching. Then it starts buzzing in my arms. Soon it’s a weighted sweater.

Wasting Time

Meanwhile, because you’re inherently unstable at the base of this gorgeous creation of yorn, the serious work you’ve put into smaller parts of yourself won’t really do much to stabilize your overall ‘self-carrier’ — or, ‘carrier-self.’ —whatever; henceforth ‘carrier.’

Moreover, because you buzz permanently in a delusion where ‘changes’ stand-in for ‘time,’ you’re left seeking what others would call ‘novelty,’ and what you — like a starving person — would call ‘anything.’ Not for nothing, but this can have a distorting effect on the big picture.

Non-fakers have plans. Sometimes they’re told to, other times they figure it out. But they plan.

Your carrier lacks a vision for the future, because the future is too many changes away to see.

Faking-it is a ruse. It’s a momentary trick. It’s precarious, living an instant from revelation.

So. No future. No rails. What in your world stays still in the meantime, for you to hold onto?

Isolating Yourself

Social media drives you crazy years before it drives everyone crazy, but they keep doing it, and you convene a summit of productive creative people to ask them if they’re also being driven insane by the Facebook algorithm, and they say they are not, but they do look concerned.

Your board has many post-it notes. This is the week you end up leaving social media behind.

Social media invites you to perform yourself anew, daily — one way or another, you burn out.

Inner Turmoil

It’s entirely possible faking-it will have led you to a point where you’re suddenly riding your bike in circles around the neighborhood, narrating Socratic dialogues in your head about what can be meant by the activity of sexual intercourse itself — (namely: nothing, is the problem; or was; this is so confusing for so long) — and, basically, the fundaments of morality. And, basically, having conversations that you really need to have, with nobody around with whom to have them, because you never cultivated a ‘having people around’-thing at any point in your development, because... basically, you always had the internet to socialize with.

As soon as you cut yourself off from the heroin-like buzz of internet approval points — (sorry, didn’t mean to catch anybody with that one, if I did; just writin’ muh words) — you don’t go numb, you go extremely thirsty. You spend hours a day in the bathtub hoovering up information about the American Revolution, possibly just so you can later tell people that in a sentence with British slang because who are you trolling at this point; you fiddle with circuit boards and bass guitar and essay-writing and...

...essay writing. It feels like thinking.

(Hi, your-inner-er-brain. I can see your nudes and stuff.) (Calm down; Teague can’t. Nobody else can. It’s just me and you in here; you’re giving me the voice and everything. I’m the zeroeth-person narrator in your mind who speaks in a fake voice that you’re generating right now. Again: Teague’s walking in circles in Mississippi right now. You’re having a conversation with a document in your mind, and it feels suspiciously like a thought you’re having.)

(Elephants.)

(I can still see all the porn and stuff in here. Again,Teague can’t. Just this voice you’re hearing can. Hi.)

See? It’s fun. Things can be fun.

Irritability

You are, in all manifest ways, quitting your own life, piece by piece — and yet later, you will wonder why every piece of it somehow quit you instead. This is what happens to someone who operates not from will, but from whim. “Idiot. Total idiot.” With the periods and everything: that’s the diagnosis. More than once, this meant “Monster. Completely unhinged.” I’ll tell you about it later.

But! One time I threw my guitar and it broke and that’s why I don’t have my guitar anymore.

You Are Reading The Downsides Of Faking It.

Eventual Insanity

You will need more support than anybody can ever, ever give — because you’re a walking cakeholder for the fucking abyss now, because you built an entire self out of the cage of sentences in your mind, and never once learned a thing about starting right. (Probably not because attempts weren’t ever made, although some attempts weren’t.) (Huh. Fun sentence.)

You’re talking to yourself.

You’re walking in circles.

Eventual Inability To Be Developmentally Relatable To Anybody

Hey, how’s work?

I can be two things.

(Loved that.)

1) Oh hell yeah. This is the inner turmoil thread now. Hell yeah. All in!

2) I was taken aback when you said you ailed the first round; I was briefly worried you must have gone off and done something else. Super cool that you kept at it. Feather in the ol' cap.

3) Man, thanks.

This tangent has ruled. (EDIT: Thus far?)

Ha!

Thanks so much, man. I don't know what to say except thanks.

(Also, thanks for volunteering to post. I really don't want folks to feel like they can't chime in on the horseshit just cuz it's blog-seeming; it's not a blog, it's a thread.)

(anyway, I'mma keep posting in bursts, possibly multiple times per day)

--

EDIT: and, lol

orsonclapping.gif us, one and all.

This gives good happiness.