Can I tell you a secret?
I feel like an impostor most of the time. I don’t mean that I have impostor syndrome. I am not faking my job and my qualifications. I am not afraid the police are going to burst into my house in the middle of the night shouting that they know what I have done, and they have caught me in my lie. No. My feeling of impersonation is much deeper.
I feel like I am impersonating a human being.
This feeling is difficult to explain. How do you put into words what if feels like when you feel like you are impersonating a human?
Obviously, because I am not able to read minds or inhabit another human’s body, I have no idea what other humans actually think and feel. The problem is most of what I feel seems fake. Like a robot taking endless Turing tests or an alien inhabiting a human form for the first time. My friendships, my feelings, my interactions with other humans all feel like a distant echo. A distant repetition of sound waves, bouncing off the walls. My emotions rest so deep inside of me that I am not always aware of them enough to produce a genuine emotional response to many things. Well, I learned early on that not showing an emotion, or walking away when someone is crying, is off putting and not the way most everyone else reacts. So, I fake it and I don’t feel genuine in my basic human interactions.
Please don’t get me wrong, I have a reaction, I feel it, it just takes me a little extra time to analyze, identify, and react accordingly. When I do have an emotion that produces a genuine emotional response, they tend to be big emotions, not the kind that most people want to be around. They are tsunamis meant to be survived, not surfed. Emotions are something that happen to me.
I feel like an impostor who does not know how to relate to other people.
This is not all bad. I will grant, I do not know what passion feels like, I think my passions instead of feeling them. I select a goal or a task and work toward it, whether I feel that passion or not. People will tell me that I am obviously passionate about one thing or another, but I rarely manage to identify that within myself. That means that if I do feel something that it is true and deep. If I love someone, I love them entirely. It is not a feeling I fall in and out of.
I feel like an impostor. I feel like most of my interactions are fake. I also know that if I have told someone that I care for them, that it is real. And that is the real problem. I always mean what I say and not everybody does. We may say the same words, we are not speaking the same language.
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