How to Fake Your Way to Happiness

Every morning I wake up, look in the mirror and say to myself “Just keep faking it.”

Just keep faking it.

My own Finding Nemo-esque mantra — but mine involves being someone I’m not, in order to be who I truly am.

Counterintuitive? Perhaps. But to understand this, you have to understand who I was in high school, and how the power of self-perception has shaped who I was — and who I’ve become.

Due to some combination of genetics and upbringing, I was never comfortable with kids my age. I noticed this as early on as middle school, when I found myself able to converse with ease with adults but struggling to relate to my peers. This isn’t very surprising, seeing as I spent the vast majority of my childhood surrounded by adults. Other than my sister, who is five years my junior, I was essentially the only child in our family. I have no cousins, save for a few second cousins that I see occasionally. So family gatherings consisted of just my nine other immediate family members — all of whom were adults — and our family friends, who were adults as well. Consequently, at a very young age, I learned how to communicate with those who were older than me. Factor in my voracious appetite for reading, and I found myself using vocabulary that no other ten-year-old ever would. Adults thought it was amusing and called me “an old soul.” As for my peers? Their response was something more along the lines of, “Why do you talk like an old man?”

When I got to high school, this problem only intensified. I was goofy and outgoing with my closest friends, but I was terrified when I talked to classmates or mere acquaintances. In my head, I saw myself as painfully awkward and embarrassing. I overanalyzed every single word I said, and at night before bed I often found myself reliving every conversation I had had that day, unraveling it to see if I had said anything that would deem me “weird” or “dorky” by my peers. This was by no means unusual for a girl my age, and I suspect that many of us still do the same. But this self-doubt and intense scrutiny slowly started spilling over into my waking hours, to the point where I would overanalyze the conversation even as the conversation was still going on. It became such a constant, never-ending process that it also became a part of who I was — I lived with that negative and condescending voice whispering in my ear for most of my adolescence.

I still have a painfully vivid memory of a day in English class senior year, when we were sharing the poems we had written with our classmates. All I had to do was go to the front of the classroom, put my poem on the overhead projector so everyone could see it, and simply read it. Yet I found myself, as I sat tucked in my seat in the back corner of the classroom, dreading the moment that I would have to stand in front of the class. But not because I had to share my poem; on the contrary, I was fairly confident in the piece I had written. No, I was petrified because I didn’t know what I would do if I got to the overhead projector and had to adjust the light so that the poem fit on the screen — what if I didn’t know how to adjust it properly and spent more than a few seconds fixing it? What if my classmates laughed at me? What if the teacher had to help me adjust it? Of course, as soon as I got to the front, I put the poem on the projector with zero difficulty and my fears were assuaged (at least momentarily). And my class and teacher ended up truly enjoying my poem.

So what was I so worried about?

I spent all of high school trying to answer this question, and to this day I have yet to find an answer. Every accomplishment was overshadowed in my head by my few failures. Every question correctly answered in class paled in comparison to how embarrassed I felt when I raised my hand and blushed a brilliant shade of red. Every funny joke I told was discredited by every time I stammered.

So while I’m hesitant to self-diagnose, since we as a society have an unfortunate habit of using mental illnesses and diseases as adjectives, I think it’s safe to say that I suffered from some sort of mild social anxiety disorder.

It’s also safe to say that I suffered from an entirely different type of disorder in high school: binge-eating. And I don’t say this lightly. We’ve all had those days — those days when your stomach just feels like a bottomless pit whose cravings and hunger can’t be satisfied. We’ve all had moments where we sit, surrounded by the wrappers of the absurd amount of food we just consumed, and think to ourselves “Why did I do that?” After all, I’ve eaten 12 slices of pizza in one day, so I am no stranger to this feeling.

But imagine doing this almost every day.

I’d come home from school, open a bag of cookies, Cheez-its, Goldfish, whatever it may be — and I would not stop eating. I would be absentmindedly scrolling through my phone, or reading a book, or watching TV; the next thing I knew, I would be feeling unbelievably bloated and truly disgusting after all the food I had just eaten. I felt so uncomfortable in my own body that I wanted nothing more than to rub my skin raw and cleanse myself from what I had just done. And to rectify my wrongdoing, I would barely eat for the rest of the day, if at all.

This went on for years.

I managed to keep this well-hidden for the most part and, fortunately, my weight never fluctuated too much, due to a metabolism that has since significantly decreased and constant exercise through cross country and track. If I weren’t writing about this right now, virtually no one would even know that I’ve suffered through an eating disorder.

Again, I’m still trying to figure out why. Why I felt the need to binge on so much food. Why I felt so uncomfortable and self-conscious in my own skin. The main culprit I can point to is a cripplingly low self-esteem. This was initially fueled by the awkwardness that came with puberty and, consequently, bad acne. Fortunately, by my junior year my skin had completely cleared up thanks to the hellish six-month regimen that is Accutane. But the binge-eating episodes continued, and I still had very little self-worth. So this turned into a chicken-or-the-egg question: was I binge eating because I had a low self-esteem? Or did I have a low self-esteem because I was binge-eating? But neither explanation satisfies me, because they’re both so upsetting.

I must have been quite the actress, for I kept all of these doubts and fears to myself throughout my high school years. But it was an exhausting, disheartening and miserable way to live — and maybe I wasn’t really living at all when I was weighed down by all of this self-imposed negativity and criticism. Again, I hid it so well that no one (save for a few close friends) would even know this about me if it weren’t for the fact that I’m sharing it right now.

So why am I? Why am I sharing some of the more vulnerable and painful moments of my past?

This serves two purposes: first, this is extremely cathartic and relieving for me to get off of my chest. And you readers are the cheapest therapy session I could score without insurance (kidding).

But more importantly, I’m sharing this because I think it’s extremely important to understand the power of self-perception. All of the anxiety and awkwardness and sadness and fear were in my head — no one else saw me in the same negative light that I saw myself in. No one could put an end to it but me.

So one day I did just that.

I woke up on the morning I was moving into the dorms for my freshman year and said to myself, “I want to stop living this way.”

And I did.

You’ve all heard those trite clichés that have been used ad nauseam: “You can change your life in a single day.” Or “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Or “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” But in my case, cringe-worthy though they may be, they all ring true.

That first day of freshman year, I put the self-doubts to rest. I threw out the negativity and self-criticism. I thought of the great relationships I had with my close friends, and how sarcastic, outgoing and funny I was with them — so why couldn’t I be more open like that with everyone I meet? It was my chance to start a new chapter of my life, and to make this one a good one. I owed myself this much at least.

And so I did.

This isn’t to say that it was easy; there’s a reason I wake up every morning and tell myself “Just keep faking it.” It took a lot of work — and still does. It took me pretending to be confident every single day for years before I stopped pretending and started simply being. “Fake it till you make it” has perhaps never applied more than it has in my case.

I’m still reaping the benefits to this day. I’ve made so many friends that I might not have otherwise, if I were still the shy, awkward and negative person I used to be. I’m more open and less judgmental towards others. I wake up every morning excited to take on the day. I work in sales and have had great success — something that would not be possible if I were not confident. And I’m truly happy.

I see it in the smaller things too. For instance, this past finals week, I had an 8-page paper due on Friday morning. So, naturally, I didn’t even attempt to start it until Thursday afternoon. I sat down in front of my computer, read the prompt, saw what I had to do, and thought to myself, “Well, shit.” As in, this is much more than I realized, and I’ve had all quarter to write this, and why did I do this to myself? Panic set in — but only for a moment. I allowed myself no more than five minutes to have an internal crisis bemoaning my tendency to procrastinate before I got to work. And I promised myself that, other than the occasional bathroom break, I would keep writing until I was done.

Long story short, I wrote 10 pages in less than four hours and got an A on the paper.

This is not an attempt to humble-brag, but rather to show yet another benefit that has come from faking confidence. I pretended that I knew exactly what I was going to write, and that I had all the time in the world to finish it. And because I allowed no room for self-doubt, I simply did what I had to do. Of course, I might be slightly biased because I love writing — if you had asked me to finish a lab report under the same conditions, I probably wouldn’t have fared as well. But the underlying sentiment remains: you just have to fake it till you make it.

And I think I can finally say that I’ve made it. So I try not to look back on high school too much, because the person I was then is a far cry from the person I’ve become today. However, I still have my moments when my inner critic peeks through, and on those days it’s a little harder to project confidence like I usually can. In fact, I’m not feeling very confident right now about sharing this with all of you; what if you start to see me differently, now that you’ve been privy to such intimate details about my past? What if you start to look for glimpses of the old me, for the kernel of truth that lies within every self-deprecating joke I make? What if you think I’m overdramatic and unstable?

Chances are, you aren’t thinking that. And even if you are — I can’t control that. All I can control is how I perceive myself, and that matters far more than how anyone else perceives me.

So, the next time you’re doubting yourself or uncomfortable in a situation or feeling unconfident, do yourself a favor and don’t be yourself. Fake it. Pretend to be confident. Think it, and you will become it. And in the wise words of Justin Bieber, the mouthpiece of our generation and that shining beacon of humanity, love yourself.