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Hello, and welcome back to my advice column. Let’s get started.
Impostor!
I have no confidence in my new coding job. I feel like I constantly know nothing, and like I’m just a total fraud that will get fired any day. I don’t know if I actually will, but more than anything, I want the feeling to go away. Help!
This is what is known to professionals (and people who like Googling things like me) as classic Imposter Syndrome. Here’s the good news: plenty of people have it.
And by “plenty of people,” I mean like basically all of the people. The only people who never experience Imposter Syndrome are people who actually think they’re qualified and belong everywhere. So in other words: absolute fucking psychopaths.
I used to be very anti-“fake it till you make it.” In many scenarios I still am. If you’re with a group of people and you’re trying to force a friendship with them, and you’re thinking, “I just need to pretend I’m on their wavelength, and eventually, it’ll happen,” you need to quit that bullshit right about now. That’s not how friendships, or really any real human relationships work. Fully be yourself and express your truth in most scenarios, or you totally are a dumb fraud.
But work is different. At a job you have to have (that’s almost all of them for almost all of us), that you can figure out on the fly, the “fake it till you make it” idea not only works, but it’s totally essential. 90% of appearing qualified to people is just pretending that you’re qualified. It’s having a strong opinion about something, and appearing certain of it, then looking around and being shocked that people bought that shit.
It’s obviously preferable to just know what you’re doing, but you can almost always fool people like this, and it’s worth doing. After all, most of the time, no one is really checking, and you need to get them checks.
Now, you can’t fool them forever, so you do eventually have to figure out what the fuck is going on. In fact, the sooner the better on that shit. I’ve heard that a lot of coders solve many problems by Googling, so that’s a good start for you. In a sense, it seems like it’s probably just like most things: you learn by doing. You can read all of the books you want. They’ll inform how to do things, but you won’t actually “know” know until you’ve done them yourself with your own hands, and eyes, and….I don’t know, feet? Do you code with your feet?
Point being action teaches you everything. So the solution to learning stuff and keeping your job is to try, fuck up, act like you meant to do it, and then keep plugging along.
So anyway, my ultimate advice comes down to this: you are an imposter right now, and that’s okay. When you need to, accept your fraudulence. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing and you’re lying to these people, and it’s totally the best way forward. So stick with it. Lie. You won’t be the first or last person to figure it out as you go, so do it, you wonderful fraud.
Oh my God! I love basketball! Go Yankees!
My boyfriend wants me to watch sports with him and get into it, and I just can’t. I’ve tried. But it’s just hard to care about what’s going on in a game I have no interest in. It’s like a soap opera where I don’t speak the language. Is something wrong with me? What should I do about this?
Look, first of all, no. As an absolute diehard sports fan, sports are totally stupid. You’re not missing anything. It’s just that a lot of people (myself included) are idiots who invest emotionally in shit we can’t control because it placates some weird monkey brain tribal warpaint shit. People be crazy.
Sports also (probably in part because of this) are really fun for some people. So if it’s something he really enjoys, I encourage you to let him enjoy it.
So with you and your boyfriend, here’s the deal. This idea that couples have to do everything together, and share passions is total bullshit. It’s a myth perpetrated by people who are fucking guessing. Relationships are not, “She likes Dr. Dre and so do I, so we are a perfect match because we can listen to Dr. Dre together.” Fuck that. You can each like your own things.
Relationships are understanding each other, and supporting each other, sometimes in spite of, and often because of our differences. So if your boyfriend is unrelenting on this, and constantly making it a thing, maybe fuck him a little (not literally). Come together on things you both enjoy, but not everything that one of you enjoys. That’s dumb. While he’s doing that, go do your own thing.
This isn’t a place to be a fraud. Don’t be one of these girls who goes to game day with sparkly eye black under your eyes, and a pink breast cancer jersey that you tie off at the waist so that it’s cute while you try to remember if this is the sport with Mike Trout in it. You’ll hate your life and yourself. It won’t be fun. This isn’t who you are, and you shouldn’t try to fake that to make him happy.
Relationships are about making the other person happy by doing nice things for them, and helping them to be who they are as their best self–not by being someone else’s stupid ideal they have in their head.
Try Not to Pass Out Before You Eat
I feel like I’ve tried every diet to ever exist. I’ve gone low-carb, low-fat, I went vegan for 6 days once. Nothing ever seems to really stick. I never see progress, then I always fall off the wagon pretty quickly. My willpower just seems to suck. How do fix it?
Well first off, I’m lucky. I’m a tall, naturally thin dude that’s never had to diet, so take my advice here with a grain of salt (and I mean literally a grain. No more!).
So I’ll start by telling you the advice I’ve read from a bunch of different places online. The best diet is the one you can follow. If you read about one that’s seen as the big breakthrough, or it’s the one all of your friends are doing, it’s probably trendy bullshit that doesn’t work any better than just successfully not eating like an idiot. Don’t look at it as some holy grail solution that will definitely change your life just because celery juice sounds cool.
With that in mind, I think what I might suggest is kind of designing your own diet you can stick to. Find some low-calorie salads you like. Set a limit to how many pizzatatoes you can have in a week as long as that amount is productive towards weight loss. Accept that you can probably just live without Jamba Juice, or whatever 80 grams of sugar “healthy” bullshit people are being tricked into consuming this decade.
Have some predetermined options you can turn to that, 1) You know you’ll like, and 2) That won’t contribute to you being a human veal calf. Get really into soup. Avoid appetizers. Free bread, and chips and salsa are your enemy.
And perhaps above everything else, except for designated cheat days (which I’d think like, don’t have a lot of those), don’t cheat on special occasions unless it’s really, really God damn special. If it’s your thirtieth birthday, and this is the only time all year you’re going to “Faux” or whatever that hot new restaurant’s name is, then sure, go for it. Have their foie gras smoothie or whatever it is they’re selling to you as food. But here are a list of things that aren’t special enough occasions to break your diet.
1. Going to a theme park
2. Going to literally any party
3. Getting a gift basket full of chocolate covered regrets sent to you
4. Going to a place with good mac and cheese
5. Going to a work dinner
6. Feeling sad
7. The very special occasion of shrugging and saying, “Fuck it.”
Special occasions have to have a rare opportunity attached to them, and be really worth doing. Choosing to eat poorly shouldn’t be about convenience or convincing yourself, “Oh I haven’t been to Taco Bell in nine days” is special.
Oh, and also, read what I’ve already said about all of this.
