Fraud

My hobby is feeling unworthy. About pretty much everything. I am a champion of inadequacy. I am a varsity level worrier. If I can feel confident about anything, it is in my sense of fraudulence. Just to prove it, the title of this post is not even my own. I ripped it off from the late, great David Rakoff. He was a much better curmudgeon than I am.

I adopted this habit at an early age. From many careful and meticulous hours of observation I gleaned, for instance, that genuine girls were creatures who wore bows and headbands and ruffled dresses(!!) and played with each other’s hair in class, and liked dolls and pink horses, and had inherent rhythm for games like pat-a-cake. 

I on the other hand, while born a girl, had none of these attributes. I dressed in corduroys and tee shirts. I cut my hair short. My parents gave me a Miss Piggy doll one Christmas and I spent a delightful afternoon tossing every single one of her clothes into the roaring fireplace. I would have hucked her in too if I hadn’t been caught just then by a very apoplectic mother.  I even went through a brief(ish) stint in kindergarten of standing up to pee, which is as difficult to pull off as it sounds. I never bothered to inform anyone what I was doing behind closed doors, and if my parents ever wondered about my brother’s appalling inability to aim or about the mysterious splatter patterns that suddenly graced the wrong side of the toilet bowl, they (and my brother too) must have been relieved when the problem just as mysteriously cleared up on its own.  

          Exactly once did I volunteer to wear a dress to school (a decision sprung entirely out of a desire to please my mother). I spent the entire day regretting my generosity and then threw up all down the front of it just before my mom arrived to pick me up.  I was a fraudulent girl. I felt it to my core.  And yet, nothing aggrieved me more than to be mistaken for a boy. Because I wasn’t actually trying to be a boy (my adventures in the bathroom notwithstanding), I was just trying to be me.

As I grew older, I found other things to feel inadequate about and in expanding my repertoire, discovered that inadequacy was both inexhaustible and almost universal in its applicability. There were the trivial, mundane worries of no consequence that I pondered just to stay in practice and keep the habit up: things like my inability to run more than twelve yards without getting a headache, the pace at which I read books, or my taste in lowbrow movies. Others were more significant; they stretched my muscles of ineptitude and expanded the very limits of my unworthiness: my ability to be liked, to have friends; my intelligence; my usefulness to the world as an individual, as member of society, as a human. Things like that.

I went into the sciences and felt like a fraud from the get-go. Oh sure, my degree was in geology, like that proved anything. All other geology degrees anywhere else in the world were earned. I only got mine because somebody somewhere made an error and overlooked my incompetence. Surely. Surely.

            Now that I’m in the humanities, unsurprisingly, little has changed. I worry that I will never be worthy enough to call myself an artist, let alone a writer. I worry that it is only a matter of time before I am either discovered by others to be a fraud, or that my house of cards will soon enough fall down on its own.

           

Enter Lesson 1:

 In his own way, my dad is also often mistaken for something he is not. In his case: a hardware store employee. Is it the dead paintbrush hair? The oversized glasses? The look of abject joy that graces his countenance as he leisurely peruses the aisles? I swear, no matter what hardware store he enters, it is only a matter of time before someone, thinking he works there, asks him for help finding something. Growing up, my third favorite field trip destination was the hardware store (after the grocery store and science museum. In that order). 

      I loved the thick columns of sticker-backed letters and numbers meant for the mailboxes. I loved the plastic signs that proclaimed things like No Trespassing, House for Sale and Private Property. I loved the Pepto-Bismol rolls of insulation that I’d immediately paw through as soon as my dad’s back was turned. I think I spent enough allowance money on stickers and plastic signs at Concord Lumber to fund a small expedition to the moon.

Hardware Stores. Better than chocolate.

            In one of my many tagalongs, after witnessing yet another exchange between my dad and a grateful looking stranger, I asked him what he was doing.

            Oh, he said. I was just showing the fellow where to find something.

            But why did he ask you?

            Well, he thought I worked here.

            But you don’t. 

            Dad shrugged. I know, but he didn’t know that. Besides, I knew exactly where to find the thing he was looking for.

            I nodded, satisfied by that anwer, and thought no more about the matter. Certainly, if there was a lesson or moral buried in there somewhere, I couldn’t be bothered to dig for it. Instead, I turned back  to my newest acquisition of slanted sticker letters and bendy No Parking sign, pleased with my evening’s haul.

Enter Lesson 2

            It wasn’t until college that I became comfortable with actually being a girl. (and, having finally achieved that, it would be several more years yet before I would fully acquiesce to being known as a ‘woman.’). It was not ironic that I chose a women’s college. It was a challenge. A challenge born of unconscious desperation, perhaps, but a challenge all the same. It was a challenge to myself to find a way to embrace both the sex I was born to and also the person that I knew I was. It was a challenge to myself to find a way to claim a right to the words female and girl (yeah okay, and woman too, fine). It was a challenge to find adequacy in my own skin. It was a challenge to become the female/girl/woman that I didn’t think could possibly exist, but that my friends and family had always seen in me. With quaking nerves and sometimes little else but persistence, I embarked on a long slog towards accepting, owning, and embracing my femininity. I’m still occasionally mistaken for a boy by people who don’t understand that short-hair is a choice, not a genotype, but I am no longer aggrieved by their mistake. I only pity them for the narrowness of their vision.

we can't all look like pin up girls, but lord knows some of us just keep trying! 

The thing is, it is easy to feel like a fraud. It is disturbingly easy. It takes very little effort and it can become such an entrenched habit that it feels like the only normal you have never known. On the other hand, it takes courage to decide to assume a mantle of worth. Of course, I feel like a fraud even saying that because I certainly don’t feel worthy to assume a mantle of such declarative authority. But here's where my dad’s hardware store adventures come in because it turns out there is a lesson there after all. Because he could have laughed off his customers’ mistake, or corrected them, or been embarrassed or annoyed, or even just handed them off to a real employee, but he didn’t because he knew he could help them. And so they continued to believe he was an employee, because it never mattered that he wasn’t. He rose to the challenge of their expectation, and he succeeded.

            Last month, when I was at a writer’s conference, I was stunned to hear other writers––writers whose prose and skills I deeply admire––esteem me not only as a person, but as an equal, a peer, a colleague. They think I have it in me. They think I can do it. They believe in me. Some days I think I can do it too. Some days, heck. I even believe in myself. Other days, I’m not at all sure. But what I need to remember is that in those moments when I’m not sure I have what it takes, when I feel like an inadequate fraud, when I am not sure that I even believe in myself, I have a choice. I can give up and give in to the old habit of feeling inadequate. Or I can take a deep breath and rise to the challenge.