I felt like a fraud today. I gave some strategic planning advice to two people older and more experienced than myself. It was good advice, but I thought, really? You know this already, right? I mean, you're done this twenty years and you run a successful program....I came back to the office and asked Shai if she ever felt like she was making stuff up as she went along and pretending to have it all together. She said all the time and couldn't I tell, and I felt marginally better.
Then Sam said she pretended too. Based on my poll of two people, I decided that most people probably are faking it in some capacity.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
"The worst crime is faking it." Kurt Cobain
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4 comments:
this is how i feel when i edit published poets and english professors--i feel like my edits are good but that if they knew that an unpublished twenty-something-year-old was behind all that red ink, they would take their manuscripts and bolt!
so do they know who's editing? or are you the mysterious editor-behind-the-computer-screen?
they know my name and that i'm the creative writing editor. they know nothing of my identity.
Faking it? Me three! Every day.
But I think there are two kinds of faking it. Duplicity, insincerity, flattery, and pretense are bad-faking. Good (or at least excusably human) faking is rehearsal for life.
"All the world's a stage"--the show is live, we're in it from the cradle, and we're making up our lines as we go. We never get to try the same exact scene twice. But better that than being stuck repeating the same scene in the same way forever; that is the gift of time. Good-faking includes pretending not to be an intimidated, self-conscious mess even when you feel like one, and improv as practice for who you want to be when you are more grown-up and put together than you are today.
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