The “I’m a fake” feeling

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David Foster Wallace’s award-winning short story Good Old Neon brilliantly explores the feeling most of us have now and then, or more often, of being a fake. If you have an hour to read the story, I recommend it. But you don’t need to. You’ll understand this blog even if you haven’t read the story. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

The narrator describes how his whole life he’s been a fraud. Instead of being an authentic person, he’s always acting to impress others. And he’s very good at it, this whole routine of putting up a front. He works hard and is successful at everything he does. That’s the neon in the story title. This guy has a seemingly almost neon aura about him. For example, he gets the popular girl. Only problem is, he’s empty inside. Even with his hand on her breast, he doesn’t feel anything. He doesn’t feel anything for the girl, and he doesn’t feeling anything in his hand. He’s too busy thinking about how he’s the guy who got to second base with Angela Mead.

Our narrator is intelligent and has integrity. He doesn’t want to be a fake. He sees how sad it is, and being empty inside hurts. Not being genuinely connected to anything or anyone is extremely painful. It hurts so much he ends up killing himself.

Before he kills himself, he tries everything he can think of to stop being fake. Nothing works. His last hope is a psychotherapist. But this doesn’t help. The therapist just tries to convince him that he isn’t a fake. Of course this doesn’t convince him. Instead, it’s the last straw. He’d had high hopes that the therapist would see that he really is a fake, and would then have some cure. Instead, the therapist just fell for the front. Thinking he was being insightful and clever, the therapist said, “You can’t possibly be fake if you admit to being a fake.” The narrator saw that coming a mile away. This just proved that he’s such a fake that by admitting to being a fake he was able to fool the clueless therapist into thinking he isn’t a fake.

Wallace’s brilliant plot device

The narrator kills himself by crashing into a concrete pillar under a bridge. But instead of being dead, he now pops up in David Wallace. We realise: the narrator isn’t the physical human who crashed into the bridge, it’s this voice that exists in each of our heads. This voice that is always talking, always trying to navigate social situations, working out how to make a good impression, trying to compensate for the pathetically inadequate person we feel ourselves to be, trying to present ourselves as something approximating a normal, acceptable person. This voice drove the other guy to kill himself, but David Wallace realises what’s going on. He realises that the voice isn’t him, it’s just a voice. He turns and looks squarely at the voice and says, “Not another word.”

A sad postscript

David Wallace wrote this story in 2001. He killed himself in 2008, age 46. He was successful, popular, and happily married. His life wasn’t the problem. The voice was the problem. He saw the voice, he tried to silence it, but of course he could not silence it, and it killed him. I cannot help but wonder: if only he had found the right type of therapist doing the right type of therapy, maybe he would be alive today. Alive, in touch with his body, able to keep that voice at arms length, and happily engaged with his work, friends, and family.

What we can learn from this

In the story, the narrator’s therapist was an analyst. Analysts use reason and logic to get you to have an insight.

It rarely works. Well, it does work in the sense that it gives you clever insights. And if you like going to dinner parties and sharing your clever insights, then you’re getting your money’s worth from seeing the analyst. But clever insights rarely stop your feelings from feeling how they feel, and they rarely stop your self-critical thoughts from turning up and making your life a living hell. And clever insights never, and I mean absolutely never, help you to get in touch with your body. And that was the key problem with the narrator in Wallace’s story, and it’s a problem for many of us (if not all of us): we don’t feel physically grounded in our own lives and the world. We feel separate from ourselves, others, and the world, and I suspect that the more verbally intelligent a person is, the worse the problem is.

There is a cure. Here it is:

1. Identify the existence of the voice. Separate yourself from it.

2. Don’t expect the voice to go away just because you tell it to. Saying to the voice, “Not another word,” doesn’t work. Instead, treat it like an annoying relative who turns up every Christmas, or a noisy construction site across the road, or a bum that follows you around. That is, acknowledge it and allow that it exists, tolerate it, and don’t engage with it. There are techniques for doing this.

3. Get in touch with your physical body. This is a learnable skill with somatic therapy. From this body awareness you will feel connected with yourself, others, and the world.