“One's own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one's friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities - the fear, the anger, the humiliation - that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another's company... What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.”
- The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick
It’s far past my self-imposed bedtime. I lay on the long side of my friend’s beat-up grey couch, nursing a headache. It’s 3 am - the witching hour. I think it’s aptly named; this is the time of night when women who have stumbled home after a night out are free to be themselves, no matter how ghastly or undesirable that self may be.
As I lay, curled up under a weighted blanket, my friend sits on the floor making her way through a pack of corner store, off-brand Wine Gums. I don’t know if its the remnants of the drinks in my bloodstream or my elevated sitting position that gives me the confidence to blurt out my deepest, darkest secret.
I have a crush.
Immediately, I am filled with regret. For the transient moment when my friends are silent, I am transported back to the sleepovers of my youth. As a girl who is self-conscious by nature, sleepover secret-sharing was the stuff of my nightmares.
Vulnerability has always been my achilles heel. I’ve justified this fear in a million different ways (my most recent reasoning is that Chiron is in the 11th house of friendships).
My witching hour admission was a part of my horoscope-fuelled new years resolution to distance myself from my fears and savor the last years of my girlhood.
In response to my hurried admission, my friend looked up from her spot on the drink-stained carpet and said: “That’s so great, I think you really deserve it.”
It was her first response, off-the-cuff and unrefined. Her genuineness was palpable; this was something she meant.
I have been riddled with imposter syndrome for as long as I can remember. It infiltrates all aspects of my life, commonly my academic career and my extracurricular successes. However, the area of my life that this imposter syndrome is most pervasive in is my relationships. This uneasy sense of guilt lies in my gut whenever I contemplate any of my connections to other people. No matter how honest our relationship is; no matter how loving, I carry an eternal fear that I have somehow tricked people into liking me.
In my relatively limited years of experience, I have found that the only way I can keep this fear at bay is by being completely myself. There is no fear of your loved ones finding some dark, horrible secret side to you if you splay yourself open and leave nothing in the shadow of shame.
In return for your bravery, for your radical openness, you will receive the presence of people who see you for who you are and love you anyway.
A realization I had during this year of total transparency took place during an incredibly childish, borderline embarrassing ritual that I indulge in with my friends. During our most tedious, horrifically boring lecture, we congregate in the back row in order to do a Buzzfeed party (in writing this, i have realized that my most vulnerable moments take place in my most girlish).
By that time, we were five quizzes deep. We had encountered a Buzzfeed quiz classic - what would your friends describe you as?
Whenever I have been faced with one of these questions without the input of a friend, I always select smart. As I explained to my mother during our talks about my adolescent self-esteem, it is the only good thing about myself that I know to be true -as a result of a psychiatric educational assessment.
Instead, in the back row of our lecture hall, my friend told me to click brave.
This minute-long interaction probably held little to no weight in my friend’s life. But as somebody who keeps the view people have of me on a level of maybe too much importance, this prompted a shift in my psyche. It took this arbitrary Buzzfeed quiz question for me to realize that people could love me for reasons that I don’t love myself.
In my eyes, my inability to let things slide results in what I perceive to be embarrassingly sensitive displays of occasionally displayed (self) righteous emotion. In my friend’s eyes, my refusal to shut up is a form of bravery.
The shift this realization prompted not only radicalized my self-image, it redefined the way I perceive and justify love. Whenever I follow any self-love advice, I cycle through the same good things I think about myself. I tell myself I deserve love for a bullet point list of reasons. The people who love me do so for a totally different set of reasons.
By limiting ourselves to certain traits we have that compel us to believe we deserve love, we subconsciously suppress natural traits that we perceive to not be worthy of love. The things about you that make you believe you don’t deserve love, may be the very reason why somebody loves you.
Every time I feel my imposter syndrome trickle into my perception of a good relationship, I hear my friend on her floor: “That’s so great. I think I really deserve this.” I leave the justifications for my worthiness up to the person who is deciding to love me.