The Fraud I Learned to Become

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Now, back to the regularly scheduled self-doubt.

For most of my life, I assumed everyone else had received instructions.

Not literal instructions. If someone had handed me The Official Manual for Being a Human Person, I would have read it twice, highlighted the relevant sections, made notes in the margins, and then become deeply concerned that I had misunderstood Chapter Four: Appropriate Eye Contact. But other people seemed to possess information I did not. They knew when someone was joking, when someone was only pretending to joke, when “We should get together sometime” was an expression of warmth rather than an invitation requiring calendar coordination. They knew when a conversation was ending before anyone actually announced, “This conversation is now ending.”

I did not know I was autistic. I would not know until I was 35.

So I came up with another explanation: everyone else understood how to be a person, and I was somehow impersonating one.

That was my first impostor syndrome. It had nothing to do with careers, accomplishments, publishing, titles, or any of the places we normally locate the feeling. Mine started much earlier. I suspected there was a correct way to inhabit the world, and everyone else had somehow figured it out.

Whenever I struggled, the struggle proved I was defective. Whenever I succeeded, the success proved I had hidden the defect successfully.

A wonderfully efficient system. No evidence was ever permitted to testify for the defense.

So I studied people.

I watched faces before deciding how to respond. I listened to tone as carefully as the words themselves. I paid attention to pauses, gestures, how long someone held eye contact, how much enthusiasm seemed appropriate. Sometimes when everyone laughed, I laughed too and worked out why we were laughing several seconds later. Apparently comedy occasionally came with delayed subtitles.

I rehearsed things other people seemed to improvise. Before conversations, I thought about what I might say. Afterward, I replayed what I had said and looked for places where I might have crossed some invisible line. I learned which versions of myself were easier for other people to understand, which interests needed editing, which explanations required shortening, and when my natural level of detail had apparently become an unsolicited documentary series.

I did not know the word masking.

I called it trying harder.

That distinction shaped almost everything. If I had understood that my brain processed social information differently, perhaps I could have understood the effort as effort. Instead, I assumed everybody was doing what I was doing and simply doing it more gracefully. I thought everyone else was improvising too. I just assumed they were better at it.

And eventually I became very good at looking natural while thinking about everything.

That created one of the strangest loops in my life. The more successfully I masked, the more people assumed I was fine. The more people assumed I was fine, the more I wondered whether my difficulties could possibly be real. So I tried harder. And because I tried harder, the performance became even more convincing.

Other people saw competence. I saw the machinery backstage.

They saw somebody who belonged in the room.

I felt like someone who had successfully slipped past security.

Then, at 35, I learned I was autistic.

The diagnosis did something strange to my past. Nothing changed, and suddenly almost everything did.

Memories that had spent years in separate boxes began belonging to the same story. Sensory overwhelm. Social exhaustion. Literal interpretation. The constant vigilance around other people. The peculiar experience of wanting connection while sometimes finding the mechanics of connection exhausting. The lifelong sense that other people were participating in a social world whose rules seemed to arrive automatically for them and manually for me.

For the first time, there was an explanation that did not begin with: Something is wrong with you.

That was enormous.

It was also unsettling.

Because how do you discover something fundamental about your own brain at 35 without wondering how you managed to live inside it for three and a half decades without receiving the technical specifications?

I had apparently been the owner and operator of the equipment the entire time.

Nobody had thought to include the manual.

And naturally, the diagnosis did not eliminate my impostor syndrome. It simply gave it new material.

Now the voice asked whether I was autistic enough. Whether perhaps I had exaggerated things. Whether I was using autism as an excuse. Whether I had somehow convinced trained professionals that I was autistic through what I can only assume would have been history’s least rewarding long con.

Impostor syndrome is remarkably adaptable. Give it decades of evidence and a professional diagnosis and it becomes a conspiracy theorist.

“Yes, the documentation is compelling. But have we considered that everyone involved may be wrong?”

The diagnosis gave me language for myself.

But language is not the same thing as trust.

That part was going to be harder.

After my diagnosis, Marianne’s psychological abuse became severe.

What made that period so destructive was not simply that someone I loved was cruel to me. It was where the cruelty landed.

Marianne did not invent the part of me that double-checked my own perceptions. She did not create the lifelong question of whether I had misunderstood the room, misread the person, missed the implication, reacted too strongly, or failed to understand what everybody else seemed to understand.

Those doubts were already there.

She learned how useful they were.

That is one of the ugliest things about psychological abuse. Sometimes it does not have to manufacture a vulnerability. It only has to find the door that was already unlocked.

I had spent decades asking myself, Did I read that correctly?

Then I found myself in a relationship where that uncertainty could be turned against me.

Something would happen and the first thought might be simple: That hurt.

Then the machinery would begin.

Maybe she did not mean it that way.

Maybe I misunderstood.

Maybe I am being too sensitive.

Maybe I provoked it.

Maybe I am interpreting this incorrectly because I am autistic.

Eventually, I became remarkably willing to consider every possible explanation except the most obvious one:

Maybe I was being treated badly.

Human cognition is astonishing. Mine was apparently committed to providing everyone else with due process while denying it entirely to me.

That was when my impostor syndrome changed shape.

Before, I had wondered whether I belonged.

Now I began wondering whether I could trust myself enough to know what was happening to me.

There is an ordinary version of impostor syndrome that says, You are not qualified for this.

Then there is a much more frightening version that says, You may not even be qualified to interpret your own experience.

I could experience something painful and immediately begin cross-examining myself about whether it had really been painful. I could remember what happened and then question whether my memory was reliable. I could know how something affected me and still wonder whether someone else had more authority to explain my own experience than I did.

My mind became witness, prosecutor, defense attorney, accused, and judge.

Somehow, despite this impressive concentration of institutional power, the only person who never received the benefit of the doubt was me.

For years, I mistook that habit for self-awareness. It seemed responsible to question myself. Mature, even. Surely the thoughtful person considers the possibility that he is wrong.

And he should.

But there is a difference between examining yourself and automatically testifying for the opposition.

There is a difference between being open to another interpretation and assuming that another interpretation must be more trustworthy simply because it is not yours.

I began to feel like an impostor inside my own experience.

That was worse than feeling unqualified for any job, room, title, or achievement.

It meant I had begun outsourcing authority over my own life.

For a long time, I thought the answer was confidence.

Eventually, I imagined, I would become so secure in myself that the voice would disappear.

This was optimistic.

Confidence is an unreliable employee. Some days it arrives early, carrying coffee and prepared to negotiate international treaties. Other days it apparently cannot determine whether an email containing the word “Thanks.” is friendly, hostile, or the beginning of an international incident.

So I stopped making confidence the goal.

What matters more to me now is self-trust.

And self-trust, I am learning, is not the same as certainty.

It does not mean believing I always interpret every situation correctly. I am autistic. I sometimes misunderstand people. So do non-autistic people, incidentally, although civilization has been remarkably generous about allowing them to call this “being human.”

Self-trust means something quieter.

Maybe I am wrong.

But the possibility that I am wrong does not automatically mean someone else is right.

Maybe I misunderstood something.

But I am still allowed to take seriously the fact that it hurt me.

Maybe another interpretation exists.

That does not require me to abandon my own before the discussion has even begun.

For most of my life, uncertainty felt like evidence against me.

Now I am beginning to understand that uncertainty is simply uncertainty.

The impostor still shows up.

Sometimes it sounds like the undiagnosed autistic kid who believed everybody else understood life better than he did. Sometimes it sounds like the years when masking became so automatic that I could no longer tell the difference between fitting in and disappearing. Sometimes it carries echoes of Marianne and that terrible period when another person’s interpretation of me seemed to outrank my own.

It still says, You misunderstood.

Maybe.

It says, You do not belong here.

Possible.

It says, Other people know better than you who you are.

That one no longer gets through security so easily.

Because perhaps impostor syndrome is not always the fear that people will discover we have been pretending to be someone we are not.

Sometimes it is what remains after we have spent years pretending not to be who we actually were.

For most of my life, I was trying to pass an inspection nobody had actually scheduled. I kept imagining that somewhere ahead was a checkpoint where some invisible authority would examine the evidence and finally decide whether I was autistic enough, capable enough, successful enough, understandable enough, human enough to proceed.

Nobody came.

I think that used to frighten me.

Now it feels almost like freedom.

I do not need a manual that everyone else supposedly received. I do not need someone to certify that my experience counts before I am allowed to live inside it. And I do not need absolute confidence before I remain on my own side.

I can be uncertain and still trust myself.

I can misunderstand something and still belong.

I can doubt myself without abandoning myself.

The impostor can come along if she insists.

She just does not get to check my credentials anymore.

If something in this essay felt familiar, you’re probably not the only person carrying that particular voice around.

That’s part of why I keep writing here. We spend an extraordinary amount of time privately believing we are the only ones who feel something, until somebody finally says it out loud and half the room quietly thinks, Well, shit. Me too.

If you’d like to help me keep having those conversations, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. You’re not just supporting the writing. You’re helping make room for more of it, the funny parts, the uncomfortable parts, the contradictions, and all the things we usually wait far too long to admit.

The impostor may still have opinions.

Fortunately, she does not handle billing.