Fake it 'Til You Make it

Dear Me at 18, 

Right now you’re shaking with nerves, walking into a Boston comedy club to do your first stand-up set. You don’t know if you can do this. But you can. And this seeming mountain of a task before you – to walk into a room full of grown-up strangers and try to make them laugh – will turn out to be just one of many baby steps on your journey. An older man in the audience will compliment your set, maybe out of pity, but it will be the tiny shred of dignity you need to keep going.

Right now, you have an intense love for comedy and feel magnetically pulled toward it. But you’ve put it on such a pedestal, you can’t see yourself as one of those incredible people who actually gets to do comedy. You’re scared of using your voice. You see yourself as the shy kid, someone wildly different from the hilarious people onstage at the Sunday night ASSSSCAT show you frequent. And yet, in someone like Amy Poehler, who stands before you in jeans and a T-shirt, speaking sarcastically to her male peers, there is a flicker of something familiar in you.  

The impossible-ness of it all will dissipate, slowly. It will take a lot of sustained effort. It will take a lot of trial and error. You will have to face a lot of your worst fears. But it is something you can and will do. 

In a few months, you’ll take an improv class. Once again, you’ll literally shake as you walk into the room. But the death of your brother, just weeks before the start of the class, makes the weight of stage fright a little lighter by comparison.

You’ll become obsessed with improv. Addicted. You’ll start to learn how to talk to other humans. You’ll make lifelong friends. You’ll be part of some incredible all-female improv groups.

You’ll accidentally get cast on an Internet reality improv competition. You’ll completely freeze up onstage and become the first one eliminated. You’ll feel like you let other women down, as one of only two women on the nine-person cast.

When you send an apologetic email to your improv coach about not being able to get past the block he’d tried to coach you through – learning to follow your foot – he’ll tell you that your apology is part of the problem. This knowledge will hit you in the gut.

Your friend, the only woman left on the show, will win the competition, and you’ll feel so proud of her while also a little bit jealous. At some point she’ll tell you her secret: “Fake it ’til you make it.”

After college, you’ll take a break from improv, unable to afford it. You’ll become deeply depressed, disconnected from your passion and your community. Eventually, another rock bottom will lead you back, with a determination to focus on something a bit more career-oriented: writing.

You’ll trade graphic design for free sketch classes. You’ll join teams, write shows, eventually directing and managing the sketch teams at your theater. You’ll run free sketch workshops for the other young women who are also so afraid to follow their foot. In lifting up the voices of others, you’ll start to see that yours, too, deserves to be uplifted. 

You’ll start a website. You and your business partner will grow it into something special with the help of many others.

You’ll continue to let yourself carry an inordinate amount of weight and responsibility for other women in comedy. It will be your blessing and curse. The respect and resentment your leadership inspires will be a struggle for you to accept, as someone who still sees herself as the timid girl on the back line.

You’ll let yourself get sucked into a lot of drama. Others will project their insecurities and biases onto you. You’ll project your own onto others. But you’ll learn from all of it. You’ll learn to do better.

You’ll learn to speak up – that your voice has value. You’ll learn that you’re allowed to have boundaries and not extend your energy to everyone’s concerns all the time. You’ll learn the best path forward often involves prioritizing your own.

For the rest of your life you’ll have two voices in your head, one telling you to put yourself into the world, the other screaming “make it stop” whenever you experience people experiencing you. You’ll slowly become friendlier with the former.

It will take time to find your voice, to find the tools that work for you. You’ll be an original because it’s the only thing you can be. The parts of yourself you keep pushing down, that others keep pushing down – that’s where the good stuff is. That’s where you’ll give voice to what others have had to push down, and that’s why you’ll find your greatest successes when you rise from the ashes of defeat. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of defeats to rise from.

Some people will have a hard time hearing what you’re saying. That doesn’t mean you should stop talking, it just means you sometimes need to repeat yourself and find those willing to listen.

Your intention will be everything in everything you do. Decisions made in fear will come back to bite you. Projects forged in hope and purpose will flourish. Some will be “just a paycheck.” But your worth will increase as you start to believe in it.

You’ll co-author a book satirizing white feminism and it will be released just days before Donald Trump wins. It will not be fun.

You’ll spend years creating a TV pilot that never makes it to air. 

You’ll co-author a book on pregnancy and childbirth. You’ll spend weekends in coffee shops for months. You’ll write while children tug on you. You’ll write when you are so, so tired. But eventually it will be the book you wished you’d had.

You’ll start a parenting podcast with your husband that becomes a surprisingly effective form of couples therapy.

You’ll do a lot of unpaid and unseen work. So many things will be harder than you can imagine. Everything will take longer than anticipated. You’ll make lots of mistakes. But you’ll learn from all of it. You’ll become less fragile, more resilient. 

And before you know it, it’s 16 years later. You’ve survived a move to the suburbs, childbirth, postpartum, childbirth in a car, thyroid cancer, and the relentlessness of your own inner critic. You have two incredible, perfect children and a bearded husband who’s been by your side for almost all of it.

And all of it was worth it. The worst parts especially. Because now you know how incredibly lucky you are. Now you know your own strength. Because you did all these hard things – the hardest things. You got through it, and will continue to. Because you must. Because it’s what that voice inside – the loving voice, the mothering voice – is calling for. And in spite of the bad days, you’ll keep coming back to her.