Writing Wednesday: Authenticity

In the years I was depressed not so long ago, I remember talking to my therapist about what it felt to have interaction with other people. I felt as if they were all robots, bumping into my robot shape, and trying to figure out how to get me to "function properly." That is, they were looking for a certain basic response to a question--will you do this for me? And I either did it or didn't do it, and was thus either functioning correctly for them or not. It seemed to me that all human interaction ended up being about whether or not I would do something or react in a certain way to someone else. They were distressed when I didn't, happy when I did.

It took a long time for me to figure out how to have more real interactions with other people, but one of the things I learned was that if I didn't want to feel like a robot, I had to stop acting in ways that did not feel authentic to me. It may sound ridiculous, but I actually still sometimes ask myself simple questions like, do I feel sad now? Do I need to cry? Do I feel happy? Do I need to celebrate? Do I feel stressed? Or frustrated? Or angry? Because I spent years in childhood and more years when I was depressed ruthlessly suppressing my emotions and making it truly difficult to tell even from the inside what I was feeling. My husband still claims it is extremely difficult to tell what I am feeling and my kids say that there are only two emotions for me--happy and mad. But I stopped caring so much about whether they can tell what I feel and started thinking about what I am feeling for myself and expressing those feelings in some way that matters to me.

A strange thing happened as a result. When I was having a conversation with a friend recently, we were talking about the common experience of feeling like an imposter. I certainly felt like an imposter in graduate school, and after that, as a writer, as well. But I haven't felt like an imposter for a few years since I started working on figuring out what my feelings were. One of the things I made myself do was to refuse to do what other people wanted me to do, and to express verbally what I felt even at times when it was uncomfortable for me.

For example, I spent some time as an atheist and am still not so sure what I think about God. Yet I have a family and married with certain obligations religiously that meant that I felt obligated to continue to attend church and participate. It was excruciating for me to sit in church each week, fulfilling jobs and never speaking the truth about what I felt. I spoke in church, taught lessons, and it was an act. Or at least, it was not fully authentic. As part of my need to stop feeling robotic around robots, I went and spoke to our pastor and explained to him that I wasn't believing anything at the moment. I also began telling other people in my life about the problem to varying degrees. The more I was able to speak the truth, the less often I ended up fleeing church meetings in tears. Now, I try to remind myself that there are probably others who think like I do, and that speaking out is an important part of finding those others, getting a real community within the church again, and showing myself as I truly am. It isn't easy, and this is probably the last place where I still struggle with imposter syndrome in my life.

In the end, imposter syndrome is about truly being an imposter. The solution is, I think, to be more authentic in everyday life, even if it is scary. I am not saying we have to tell everyone everything, but we need to stop choosing to wear masks simply because it is more convenient to do so. This is especially vital to do as a writer. We cannot write well, we cannot write what is uniquely ours to write, unless we know who we are and are willing to show who we are with our words. Yes, it is scary to do this. Yes, it may cost us things that we are reluctant to give up. But if we refuse to make this choice, we will feel like imposters because we will be imposters.

I was playing a party game with some friends recently where some people are secretly mafia and some people are secretly detectives. I hated the game because I hated pretending myself and I really don't enjoy trying to figure out if other people are pretending. I tend to be pretty up front and blunt (though that doesn't always mean I have been authentic). Anyway, I thought about whether or not actors could be authentic, if they spent all their working time pretending to be someone else. And it occurred to me that in some ways, putting on a mask helps us figure out where the lines are between masks and reality. I think for authors, there can be something of the same discovery. Writing fiction is a way for us to draw a line between real and fake. But the more we do so, perhaps, the more we figure out the ways in which we can make the fake real by infusing it with our real self. This is the gift of acting, and of writing. That when we are fake, we can also be the most real. Yes?