As you can probably guess from the several-month gap between posts here, I've been dealing with a little bit of impostor syndrome.
More accurately, I've been periodically getting hit with the suspicion that everything I'm doing and experiencing is total bullshit, I'm pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, and I'm really just some hack making shit up as I go. I've given a bit too much credence to the idea that I'm just fabricating my experiences and passing them off as real for some weird internet clout. This happens to me every few months or so, but over the last couple of weeks it's become increasingly difficult to ignore.
I know that I'm far from alone in this experience. I'm generally a believer that if you're not feeling at least a tiny bit of impostor syndrome sometimes, then you might actually just be playing pretend. But at the end of the day, does the distinction even really matter?
Back when I modded a somewhat large metaphysical Discord server (which, I bet some of you still in there are reading this, so hi!), one of the most common concerns I'd see from newcomers was whether what they were experiencing, doing, seeing in divination, etc., was legit, or if the gods were listening to them, things like that. It's an incredibly common and definitely understandable concern. I always tried to answer it as compassionately and honestly as I could, but I tended to shy away from expressing the entirety of my opinion on the issue.
Namely, as I've gotten into on this blog before, who cares?
True to the title of this post, I had to start faking it till I made it by faking that I was faking it till I made it. I had to start by convincing myself that faking it was even a viable method of developing a sense of security. Real baby steps. And then somehow somewhere along the line, things started feeling more real, and I was able to develop more confidence in myself and my practice. When I started rambling on about shit like, "whether or not the gods are really real doesn't change that my interactions with them have changed me for the better and positiviely impacted the ways in which I interact with the world around me," I actually started to mean it.
And then I'd hit a fallow period and almost always had to start from scratch. Rinse and repeat.
This doesn't even just apply to my spiritual practice either. Far from it. I've been pretending to like certain things and act in certain ways since I was in elementary school and had my first realization that people disliked me because I was different from them. I'm sure most people have done this to some degree, but as someone who grew up pretty visibly neurodivergent and with very few friends, it became deeply embedded in my everyday life to the point that I'm still working through it in my twenties. The desire to fit in just got replaced with wanting to become "that girl" or maximize my productivity or make my sketchbook look just like those CalArts sketchbooks I kept seeing on YouTube.
See, I was just about to make the excuse that "lockdown was really weird for me," as if the whole point of this post isn't that I'm still doing this shit to this day. I don't think it ever really ends, and I'm positive that I'm far from the first person to reach this realization.
But I-- like others, I'm sure-- can sometimes feel a bit better when someone other than me verbalizes these thoughts. I guess that's why I'm writing this out here in the first place instead of just lamenting in my journal about it.
Do I still genuinely belive what I was talking about, about the empirical reality of the gods not super mattering to me? I don't know. My interactions with the divine have gotten a lot more personal and weird and otherwise inarticulate since then. But it's simple enough to be mostly understood by folks with less experience than I do, so I keep saying it. Not sure how many others out there can speak for this, but I've definitely noticed that as I've gone further along in my practice, the parts that I explain to others out in the open have gotten a lot more... Not simplified, but definitely more selective. But the people asking the questions still seem to be satisfied by the response. I guess this is just another aspect of faking it, maybe.
I don't want the ending here to be a bunch of empty platitudes about anyone's experiences being totally valid or whatever. I think that kind of goes against what I started off with here. I don't think that's really the point. I guess a better way to phrase it would be to say that you're far from alone, and you don't need to tie yourself into knots trying to justify why or how you rationalize what you're doing with your practice.
We're all just kinda bullshitting our ways through all this after all, aren't we?