The Art of BS.

A friend recently joked about their career with me, and at one point said something like "I'm just worried people will find out I'm faking this whole thing."  I found this odd, because they've been nothing but successful.  I also found it strikingly familiar.

Despite me outward persona, I battled insecurity for a long time.  Usually, it was about this very thing.  I always felt like I never knew what I was talking about, that I was just good at BSing my way through things, and that I was the biggest Holden Caulfield-style phony there was.  My career in youth ministry didn't help because despite how well I may have actually done, working for jerkfaces kept my ego completely underfoot.  I always felt like I was a fraud.  It really came to a head when I was finishing my undergrad at St. Thomas.

I took a lot of philosophy classes because they really interested me, but that required me to write a lot.  Unlike math, where you can stumble into a correct answer accidentally, you really have to demonstrate that you know your stuff in philosophy.  Every paper, every test, I felt like a total fraud, and that I didn't know what I was doing.  Even though I made all As, I convinced myself that I had fooled my professors. 

Finally, during my last semester, I was taking an independent study on CS Lewis.  I had read eight of his books, and was required to produce a 20 page paper on whatever topic I wanted.  I was crippled.  I couldn't even begin because I knew I was a fake.  As I started looking back through old papers and essay tests to "scavenge" a good idea, I realized that I had made As on everything.  I had empirical evidence that I could write philosophically, and I could do it well.  The only thing stopping me was the fact that I had not realized that what I thought was BS, was actually me being great at what I did.  Here I was thinking that I was just pretending to write these academic papers, when all along I was actually doing it.  So, I wrote an awesome  paper on CS Lewis, and got another A.  I graduated Cum Laude.

Since then, I've worked on reminding myself of the many things I have accomplished to keep the insecurity at bay.  It's a work in progress without a doubt, but I can see my way through the fog with more regularity.  Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that I can occasionally develop an impenetrable shield of cockiness and unwarranted over-confidence, but that's a story for another time.

In other news, a very Merry Christmas to all (three or four) of you.  Please know that you are well loved, deep in the heart of Texas (clap x4).