Chapter 1: Curated Facades and Imposter Syndrome
"Having grown up so familiar with creating a pleasing facade, I now end up compelled to reveal things inside and say, 'Okay, now you really see me. Do you still love me?' And then it's never enough; it always has to be total self-revelation." - Kathryn Harrison One of my earliest coping mechanisms were to create facades, not because I'm a sociopath who lacks empathy. Quite the opposite; I created facades because I have empathy and inherited the people pleasing trait from my parents. I became whatever version of myself that I felt people wanted, in order for them to feel safe and valued. While I may have used a different toolbox than a sociopath, my facades were still a form of manipulation to get people to like me more. Why do we create facades? If you're a person of color, woman, LGBTQ+, or non-Protestant, something we're all familiar with is code switching, a survival tool we adopt to assimilate in predominantly WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Prote...