When Pretense Becomes You
Ever feel like a poser at work? Seems easy to fix. Just be yourself, right? But being yourself puts you in the tricky gap between your presentational self and all those other selves you are as well.
Everybody suffers Imposter Syndrome at work. But how do you deal with the fact that sometimes you’re not just an accidental pretender but an outright poser? “When did that happen,” you mutter to yourself. “How’d I become that person?”
Just be yourself is the standard therapeutic advice. But authenticity is hard, especially in the intense digital spaces where we do so much of our work.
Here’s one simple way that authenticity feels hard. Say you’re in a Zoom meeting. You have a strange choice:
Do you look like you’re gazing into eyes of other people (by starting at the green dot of your webcam) or…
…do you actually look at their faces onscreen in order to read their cues?
Both ways of looking involve us in a kind of theatre. Neither is fully adequate.
Zoom meetings remind us all that we are presentational creatures who aspire for connection. They also remind us that we’re dependent on others to see us.
This week, I’ve got three stories to chat up. They’ve been important to me this year, mostly because they name the challenges of living between the face you can control and the back of your head, which you can’t.
They’re also great stories to take to the beach or on your walk or onscreen in the cool of your basement when the cicadas get too loud.
The Problem with Being the Self
American Fiction’s the movie I watched instead of fireworks on July 4th. (Judge me not.) I remembered the lead, Jeffrey Wright, mostly for his supporting role as the CIA agent in the Daniel Craig Bond movies. But this quietly funny movie puts Wright’s remarkable talents to work, as he plays a university professor (Thelonious “Monk” Ellison) who writes elegant novels that nobody buys. Disgusted by bestsellers that (as he sees them) pander to unthinking audiences, he writes a satire that uses every African American stereotype he can think of. White audiences go nuts. The novel, published under a pseudonym and attributed to a fugitive on the run, becomes a bestseller.
In my favorite conversation of the film, Monk confronts another Black novelist (Sintara Golden) about the way her books flatten out the diversity of Black experience in America. He says, “white people read your book and confine us to it. They think we're all like that.”
Sintara responds, “Then it sounds like your issue is with white people, Monk, not me.”
Monk rejoins, “That may be, but I also think that I see the unrealized potential of black people in this country.”
To which, Sintara says, quite devastatingly, “Potential is what people see when they think what’s in front of them isn’t good enough.
What I love about this conversation (and, really, the whole movie) is that it doesn’t settle the argument. It allows both of these opposing ways to do work to co-exist. I also love the way that Monk faces a question that bedevils the rest of us, too:
When is just being you—even if no one ‘gets’ you—a failure to love your neighbor as yourself?
The Problem with Seeing the Self
If your office air conditioner’s not working properly, you may find Rebecca Makkai’s fourth novel, I Have Some Questions for You, consolingly wintry. It’s set on a snowy New Hampshire campus, where film professor Bodie Kane arrives to teach a podcast course. One of her students decides to podcast about a campus homicide that happened decades back. Bodie tries to keep her distance from the student project but is steadily drawn into sleuthing the cold case.
Meanwhile, the husband she’s separated from gets trolled for alleged sexual harassment. Bodie’s susceptibility to being duped by somebody is a wrenching and relatable dimension throughout this story.
The book’s a quick read, part thriller, part whodunit, and part meditation on the many selves that people are. As Bodie snow-boots her way down her high school sidewalks, she marvels that “I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there.”
One question the story confronts us with is, if our selves are in layers, can we ever know other people’s inner truths and hidden pasts? Bodie tries to use her sleuthy spotlight to discern who’s the wrongdoer and who’s just a douche. But it’s hard.
Most us don’t deal with homicide as we go about our jobs. But we do cope with petty crimes in the workplace—the pissy conflicts, the territorial contests, the squabbles. And when those happen, we are confronted, as Bodie was, with this question: how do you truly see people without seeing through people?
The Problem with Deceiving the Self
R. F. Kuang’s the first author I’ve read to make a thriller about plagiarism. (I’ve learned since that there are others.) Her dubious protagonist, June Hayward, is a white woman who finds a book manuscript by a prominent Asian author who has just died. June reworks the secret manuscript, publishing it under the pseudonym “Juniper Song.”
This is a story about what can happen to a self when a whole industry gets sick. June is a deceiver and a manipulator. But she’s doing so as a relatively poor writer in an industry that’s massively arbitrary in its use of people for the profitable ends.
What got me about this book—besides the ghost story—is that June is a very hard worker. She’s a plagiarist, sure. But she’s not a copy-and-paste sort of fraud. She writes like a person whose existence depends upon diligence. She researches extensively. She rewrites painstakingly. She takes the time to be genuinely artful, even in revising a stolen book. And she can be persuasive for whole pages at a time.
Kuang’s novel confronts us with a hard question: how do you do your thing in a working community where every self seems to be using every other self?
Why You Need These Stories This Summer
When you feel the artificiality of your way of being at work—when you feel, in other words, like some sort of sham—these two stories and a movie don’t corner you with the one right way to be you.
But they evoke a mode/switch. Each of these stories’ main characters run into trouble when they try to control their own life story. Note, I’m not saying that they run into trouble when they try to create their own story. Everybody gets to do that, simply by virtue of being human. But making the shift from controlling your story to creating your story reminds you of your dependence on others to tell your story back to you, and with compassion.
