Ask Alex: How do I stop feeling fake?
"How do you ever stop feeling like a fake. It made sense when I was in my 20s, but I'm rapidly approaching 40 and still always feel like I'm in the faking it stage."
— Anonymous
I can't answer that on a clinical level. Imposter syndrome is a real and varied experience, and sometimes there are reasons beyond one's relationship to it that make it hard to shake. If that’s what you are experiencing, I can’t offer advice for that manifestation.
What I can say is that many of the conditions we live under make our professional, interpersonal, and familial performances feel inherently fake. We're required to act against our own instincts just to make a living, get by, and exist reasonably undisturbed. That incongruence isn't confined to one part of life. It shows up at work, with family, in every social group we move through.
There are also real, escalating consequences for stepping outside sanctioned norms. Consequences for calling out systems that are absurd or hypocritical. Consequences for existing in ways that don't match state-mandated categories, like gender identity. At minimum, that means living in constant psychological and physiological discomfort, down to something as basic as which bathroom you're allowed to use. At worst, it means imprisonment, harassment, being driven to suicide. And that's one example of how thoroughly the policing of "normalcy" reaches.
This connects to what gets celebrated and what doesn't. Which transgressions are acceptable, and which aren't. Be yourself, as long as the self is stylish. Be yourself, as long as it's palatable within narrow limits. We're asked, constantly, to arrive within those limits. There's real tension between an authentic self (a concept with its own problems, but useful enough here) and the self we're permitted to present without being punished for it.
We're asked to become versions of ourselves we don't recognize, not just to get promoted or advance a career, but to be allowed to show up at all. To eat with any regularity. To have housing. Fail at that, and you're made perpetually illegal, which is exactly what's been done to people who are unhoused.
Here's where I want to add something. Under capitalism, shame gets pointed in the wrong direction. People without wealth are shamed for not measuring up, for not being "real" or successful enough, for supposedly faking it. But it should be reversed. It's the accumulation of extreme wealth, and the means by which it's accumulated, that deserves shame. Instead that accumulation is rewarded, admired, treated as proof of realness. The system asks the person struggling to get by to feel fake, while treating the person hoarding resources as the standard of authenticity.
Add to all this social media, which not only amplifies the avenues for these performances, it demands it. It invites our feelings of inadequacy to keep us hooked on promises to sell solutions.
I lay all this out because "I feel fake" can sound to some like a small complaint. It isn't. It's a real psychological and philosophical question: what does realness even mean, in a system where authenticity is narrowly defined and penalized the moment it steps outside that definition? Capitalism, or whatever we're calling this stage of it now, doesn't want you real. It wants you fake. Fakeness is encouraged, rewarded, even valorized. Even what passes for "realness" is often just a more convincing performance.
So I don't know how anyone fully escapes feeling fake by the standards we've collectively set, or that have been set on our behalf. I think the most honest thing available to us is this: am I showing up based on my own instincts? Where I'm not, why not? Do I have the freedom, power, or insight to challenge the ways I've been shaped by default, rather than by choice? Am I examining that regularly enough that I don't settle into comfort with expectations that don't actually serve me? What is, as far as I am concerned “real” and what is standing between me and being that?
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Submit your own questions anonymously or email them to alexsteed at gmail dot com