Messy, Fake, New, and Never

A bit on becoming someone else.

Fake boobs get a bad rap.

I mean, they look great (most of the time). They give their owners confidence. They create jobs (like actual medical jobs, not whatever you were thinking Steve! Get your head out of the gutter.)

They’re an all-around win for everyone. But there’s that word, “fake,” which drags it all down.

We hate fake.

It’s the first jab we throw when sensing inauthenticity, or like we’re being manipulated, or when something appears to be less than its original (or our expectation of it).

But, whether we know it or not, our hatred of fake seeps into our perceptions of self. It keeps us small, sometimes stuck, and often closed off from becoming everything we can be.

A good place to begin is at the firm, supple center of the word itself.

What Fake Feels Like

We know fake when we see it…kind of.

A designer bag is fake when it’s made by an off-brand manufacturer. We know money is fake when the sketchy dude down the street starts flaunting oddly green hundreds. And we can tell when a kid is faking sick because they don’t want to go to school.

Ok, but why does this give me 90s grunge vibes? Source: Pinterest

In all three examples, there’s an element of trickery involved. Someone is trying to pull a fast one for their benefit.

But what about when the intentions are more innocent?

Right now, you are something at some point you never were before.

If you’re married, you used to be single. If you’re a lawyer, you used to be a student. If you’re now getting 65+ discounts, there was a time when you ordered exclusively from the kid’s menu.

You've changed in more ways than you can count. Some of these changes were intentional. Others, accidental.

If you’re human (which I’m assuming you are) I'd bet many of these changes threw you for a loop. They made you question who you were becoming. You felt imposter syndrome. At points, you felt…fake.

But what if it was necessary? What if change is supposed to feel unknown and unaligned and inconsistent?

The Mess of Becoming

Of all the f-words we’ve covered so far, this one feels the most personal.

I spent the first half of my life wearing masks that kept me safe. Trauma will teach you all sorts of lessons, most of which are untrue.

I spent the second half of my life undoing these masks, or at least trying to, but when I pulled – some didn’t want to give. Wtf? I was sure these parts didn’t “belong” to me. The real me, that is. But then, maybe I didn’t know what was “real” or who I “authentically” was. Maybe I was using the word “fake” in the wrong way.

Obviously, I’ve still got a lot to learn.

But I’ve unwound at least three truths about becoming that have helped me step into fuller versions of myself with less anxiety, guilt, and pressure. You might find them helpful.

Becoming Takes All of It

I’ve written about this encounter before, but a few years back I got to digitally meet one of my favorite writers. It was him, and a handful of others, in a Zoom call talking about creativity and life and pizza. All good things.  

Midway through the call, the writer homed in on me and something I said. At this point in my story, I was a lost puppy. I was living in a new city, working in a new industry, and so incredibly stuck mentally because my whole life felt like a lie. I didn’t know how to reconcile who I used to be with who I was now, or if that was even possible.

That’s when he said the following,

“You have to learn to love all the David Ramos’s.”

Tbh, I had no idea what it meant at the time, but it felt right. And it got me all choked up when I thought about it. It wasn’t until a few years later when a pal gave me a book by a friendly Canadian named David G. Benner that it started to make sense.

In the book, Human Being and Becoming, Benner writes about a whole lot of psychoanalysis that flies right over my head. But some of it reached down and gave my soul a hug.

“The truth of the self is the whole self. If we attempt to eliminate the rejected parts, they simply increase their power to keep us fragmented. Wholeness comes from inclusion, not rejection.”

It was that last line that made the writer’s callout start to click.

As you become, grow, develop, there’s this temptation to deny where or who you’ve been. I don’t know exactly why that is. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s culture. But either way, it’s ineffective.

True becoming is an amalgamation of all of it. Everything you used to be, every mistake, every wrong turn, along with every win, and stroke of luck, and happy accident. Becoming requires us to accept all the colors before we can fully paint the new picture.

Benner writes, “each level of existence enfolds all [previous] levels.”

A less poetic way of saying it is that implants are added to the existing breasts (either over or under them). The “fake” boobs work together with the original boobs to create something new, something beautiful.

Becoming is Never Binary

Our minds are wonderfully efficient in large part because they’re incredibly lazy.

It thinks in binaries as often as possible to save energy: on/off, good/bad, before/after, etc. This is great for most of the low stakes things we deal with in life. But not so great when it comes to complicated subjects like identity and mental well-being and progress.

Your mind tries to keep everything classified this way, even you.

You can hear it in the ways you talk about yourself: I’m fat/skinny, rich/poor, funny/serious, dumb/smart, pretty/ugly.

This is partly why change can be so difficult, because it asks you to push against some ingrained identity. Becoming challenges you to go against yourself. That’s the heart of the conflict.

It’s why starting new habits or breaking routines or thinking new thoughts can feel like an uphill battle. We’re an either, trying to become an or.

The answer is to drop the binary.

Since I’m a visual person, we’re going to talk about butterflies now. If you paid attention in science class, you’ll remember that butterflies come from caterpillars. And the whole process is one of the best examples of non-binary growth.

This is probably the only insect reference you’ll ever get. Source: Louisville Zoo

All the way at the beginning, the creature starts as an egg. The egg hatches into a larva, which slowly grows into a caterpillar. The caterpillar eventually forms a chrysalis where it gets all dolled up and emerges, slowly, as a full-grown, brilliant, fluttery butterfly.

At no point is the creature either a caterpillar or a butterfly. It's a whole mess of things along the way. Sometimes it's both. The caterpillar has the butterfly in it, as does the butterfly the caterpillar. You can't peel away one from the other because you can't have one without the other.

And that’s how people grow too.

Becoming is Like Visiting

Let’s talk about the PP problem (you can blame this bad joke on the number of Hims commercials I’ve seen on Hulu 😅). PP = perpetual vs periodic.

We've all seen those images (like the one below) that show expectations vs reality. On one part, the path is smooth, simple, and consistent. On the other, it's chaotic, swirling this way and that, eventually winding its way into a positive direction.

IRL the arrows rarely end up where we think they will. Source: Medium

The PP problem is kind of like this. We expect growth to be perpetual. That once we begin a path towards X (e.g., becoming healthier, stronger, less anxious, etc.) we’ll stay on that path until our destination is reached. Boom, happily ever after.

But that’s not real life. Most of the change we experience is periodic. We step into it and then back out, little by little, and over and over again. Writer Pia Leichter calls it visiting,

“Instead of pushing and wanting it to be that way all the time, treat [it – your new self] like a place you visit.”

Visiting allows us to “try on” the new selves we’re working to become. It’s light, without the weight of permanence. Each visit makes us a little more comfortable with the us we’ve never been before. So that, eventually, we can spend more time in the new place, in the new us, than in what came before.

That’s why we call it becoming. It’s an ongoing activity. It takes time, practice. And in the middle of becoming one thing, you’ve already begun the process of becoming something after that.

Faking It Forward

You have permission to be a thing you’ve never been before.

Even if you feel fake doing it or people call you fake seeing it. The resistance they throw on you is simply the gunk they’ve never managed to overcome themselves.

So, flaunt the you you’re becoming. Own the messy path that’s getting you there. And if it takes a bit of silicone to unlock your best self, load up my friend.

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Challenge #6: Fake It, Let's Time Travel