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 mean,t hat's where a story like that would normally go. The kind of shit malicious compliance is born of. But it was a personal epiphany instead, something he needed to hear at the time. So, yeah, thanks, shut the fuck up Beethoven. (This one time, don't let it go to your head.) We've all share our fair share of personal revelatory moments that came at just the right time, what would otherwise be the mundane.

My oldest, who definitely doesn't want to be a veterinarian because euthanizing fuzzerses, is currently nursing a suckling baby mouse she found in the basement back to, hopefully, health. She's adorable, petite, and a gawddamn sergeant major in high-school R.O.T.C. (military pre-cadets, in case the acronym doesn't convey meaning outside of the U.S.). Today is wear the uniform day, she had to leave the helpless gray fuzzy thing at home, but first she fed it by hand, wearing her blue-gray skirt and jacket. Somehow, in spite of all my own "hey Beethoven" moments, my own outcastery, my selfishness, this little miracle made herself into on of those non-fakers. Her circle of friends is an island of misfit toys; the bullied, the outcasts; like me, like us. She's their mother, protecting them, nourishing them.

The best thing I learned from my own, somewhat stunted, little father is to find some things worth persevering for, and then never let go of them. Before I was a twinkle in his eye, he'd shellacked a newspaper clipping onto a polished cross-section of tree branch, always to be prominently displayed in his den: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” ― Calvin Coolidge

I just hope that tiny rodent is still sucking air when Meredyth gets home from school.

Seconded, and I'd also like to congratulate you on making the best case for wanting to have kids.

What an incredible piece of text.

Last edited by Saniss (2021-11-04 21:00:49)

It took me a restart to realize that the "she" is referring to "My oldest", not to "a suckling baby mouse"

But yes - a great post. I feel that determination is sometimes oversold, but yes, more often undersold as an important ingredient to success.

I got a nephew in the ROTsee

Not gonna lie, I read that as "moose" and not "mouse" and was really confused at the end when it was referred to as a "little rodent."

On the topic of self identity:

When I was a kid, I didn't really have any friends, and I though this was because nobody liked me. (Turns out people did like me and the real problem was a mountain of social anxiety, but getting over that is a different, though perhaps still relevant, story.) I decided I didn't care what they thought, I would be who I wanted to be anyway. I figured out who I was, who I wanted to be, and the path I would take, and built myself an Identity out of concrete and rebar, impregnable and immutable. I was immune to teasing and bullying, but also incapable of accepting input and feedback and was stubborn as hell, master of my own destiny. And then I went to university.

I began my studies into the career I had carefully selected and carved into the stone of my soul, and very quickly realized I absolutely detested it. But this was who I was, and the only option was to press forward. And thus began the two most miserable years of my life. In the end I broke, I couldn't do it, and in that moment it all came crumbling down. For a while I stopped being a person and fell into a hole I nearly didn't climb back out of. I wasn't merely a failure, I was a Nothing, and I felt I might as well get it all over with. Thankfully my family and friends (I did eventually make some friends) staged an intervention and got me back on my feet.

I no longer knew who I was, but all these people around me seemed have all these ideas to that regard, and it became easy to just let them project that onto my now blank canvas. My self went from almost completely internalized to almost completely externalized. It was so easy, just going with the flow, purely reactive to what those around me expected. But I eventually realized it wasn't satisfying, none of my goals and asperations were actually mine, none of my achievements felt like they were my achievements, I was just doing as expected and getting empty feeling good boy pats. I was just a strange mirror fake, or a marionette dancing on strings. The real me was still somewhere down in that hole, and if I was going to get them out I was going to have to build something structural.

But this time I was building a framework, not a fortress. I need solid foundations, but not everything needs to be sacrosanct. For example, I suspect I'm non-binary, but more accurately I just don't really care, so hanging a big sheet for society to project a gender onto works well enough for me. Maybe I'll build something in that space later, but it's not a priority. But on the other hand I'm not going to let some corporate media empire convince me that letting lots of people die is ok as long as we're making enough money. It's like a pillar or something. This framework metaphor kinda breaks down the more I think about it, analyzing is a lot harder without the power of hindsight. Maybe it's more like a house with furniture I can move around and the walls take a more serious remodeling project? I'm still working on it (both the metaphor and the Identity.) Regardless, despite a GLOBAL PANDEMIC happening, this version of me is by far the overall happiest version yet, though the pandemic did really put all that work I did to the test. I guess third time's the charm, eh?

Also I vote Comedy Smallmoose as new forum mascot.

I'm 35 now. 36 in a week.
I still don't feel like an adult, even though the adults told me I would become one at a given time.
I have a fiancee now, and a 15 year old son living with me. I'm a millenial. I'm newly debt-free, bought my first car less than a week ago, and am currently working my way through the drivers license, so I can legally drive said car.

What's the point of that?
Faking it.
I'm not unlike Teague. I work in retail, and even though I've learned a lot during my adult life, I'm still prone to faking it with other human beings, because goddamnit, I don't really care about them. "Hey, you know what I did last week?" [Innerself:] I don't fucking care. "No, what DID you do last week?"
If something doesn't concern or affect me, it's irrelevant, but I still continue to fill my already-full brain with more, irrelevant information about other people I don't even know.
But, I mean, that's just life, for me.

What I was going to tap onto, was your remarks about social media.
Why is it even a thing? What happened to humanity, that they sit through "stories" on Snapchat, Instagram, facebook and whatnot? Why do they crave to know what literally everyone else is up to, and what does it give them other than an all-knowing state of mind? People bost the most boring and irrelevant shit to those places, and somehow, other people turn up. To encourage or scald, sure, but suddenly everyone has a voice, and about 80% percent of those think their opinions matter too. "FUCK THIS" "FUCK THAT".. To which my reply is usually "FUCK YOU", but at least I keep it to myself, as I don't think it relevant.

Social media is euphoria. The ability of being heard other than on some message board. Where YOU, with your ACTUAL NAME may have some recognition. It's like a local newspaper covering your discovery of Jesus in a sweat stain, but people can't get enough. And it's not just the men. But the women, and children too. Suddenly everyone needs to be heard, and everyone needs to jump in on the latest trends(I'm OK with planking, in it being fairly innocent, but what the fuck is licking toilet seats!?), just so others can see they did it?

I'm not saying I'm better. Or, I am saying that. But that's because I managed to realize the errors of my ways a few years ago, and aptly deleted my facebook profile, keeping it strictly to messenger.
Why keep messenger? Read the first paragraph. Because while I'd love to just be anonymous, and use emails for communication, and giving my phone no. to the people I am ok with having it, my point still stands: EVERYONE uses social media. Even teachers, schools, parents, clubs, sporting people. the whole fucking lot. Want to be updated on your son's school? No, they don't do email, it's all on facebook. Want to be notified on the latest crowdfunding for a gift for a teacher or someone of importance in your son's school? GET FACEBOOK OR GET FUCKED, because you don't have it, they KNOW who you are, and that you didn't fucking participate in some platonic, making-appearances sort of bullshit, that you, or your son don't really care about or want to partake in, but if you don't?

I live in a small town. It's fucking hell when you don't. And they live by flock mentality, so you know.
The point is, facebook has already won, and there's not much we can do about it.

Now, don't get me wrong. Not EVERYONE is a problem. People like faldor will share links about stuff I do find interesting, or updates on his novels on Facebook and instagram, and that's not bad.

But maybe that's because he's one of the people I care about.

I don't know. Fuck social media. Until you need to advertise something. Then, ESPECIALLY fuck social media, because Karma I guess.