Fake fakery…

I have a deep, and primal hate for the phrase “fake it until you make it”. I haven’t spent a lot of time actually trying to define why I dislike the phrase so much, as I don’t think that knowing actually offers much value over the long term. However I can speculate a bit on what my intuition tells on the matter.

First and foremost, I know that I associate the phrase with flippant advocates of this mindset that is presented as almost defiantly insincere. Anyone that knows me is distinctly aware that I am pathologically averse to insincerity. Every warning alarm I have will trigger in the presence of it, and I am generally a well-functioning sincerity radar supported by a healthy dash of general skepticism and mistrust.

In parallel to that however, and with perhaps a touch of pedantry sprinkled in, is the view that the phrase is factually and functionally inaccurate. From a fortune cookie standpoint it works fine, but I am inclined to quibble a bit about the details specifically in regards to how the phrase is intended.

The less solid of my issues surrounds the use of the word “fake” in respect to knowledge and aptitude. You can certainly misrepresent. You can obfuscate. You can pretend. You can even guess. But I am dubious if you can actually “fake” these, especially aptitude.  In order to present something as genuine that is not, you need something to present. If you appropriate someone else’s work as your own, the aptitude / knowledge involved is not fake, it is real. It is simply not YOUR aptitude… just your assholery.

Anyhow, I believe the core issue I have is with the overall concept itself.

Fake it until you make it.

If you do not know something, and you engage in the process of obtaining or achieving such a thing, you are learning. By this logic we are all faking until we are making, and I take enough exception to this that I took the time to post a meandering ramble about it.

The point of all this is that I have grown to prefer a much more noble, and much more accurate phrase to replace the phrase that must not be named, and thankfully it works on a fortune cookie too:

Aspire to, and acquire through…

I try very hard to surround myself with people that posses qualities that I admire… That I aspire to. And it is through this exposure to them that I can learn from them and (hopefully) acquire those same traits or skills. I choose a life of constant improvement and betterment (mostly as a way to channel my neurotic need to fix things), and while I may fall short more often that I would want, I do not feel it is accurate or helpful to define any of this as “faking”.

Perhaps both phrases represent two sides of the same coin, ultimately defined by the sincerity or motivation driving them. A yin and yang view of the same fundamental concept. I can concede that as a possibility. But in the end, I prefer to align with nobility of genuine growth through aspiring and acquiring than to embrace the dis-ingenuousness of fakery.

Because I am, in fact, stupid like that…

For the last 10 years or so I’ve been aware that my left shoulder had an issue with getting extremely sore when I would start working out after an extended period away from such pursuits. It would generally clear up after a week or so and I’d be able to progress ahead pain free. I always assumed it was some sort of bursitis situation and didn’t really think much of it.

Fast forward to around October of 2019 when I once again decided that it was time to move beyond just the treadmill for my fitness, and I started lifting a bit. Almost immediately the pain in my shoulder started, and after a week or two of working with weights the constant pain forced me to stop. I figured that I would simply wait it out before resuming my lifting, since it would assuredly cease quickly.

Around this time I also began to experience extremely sharp pains in my spine at the base of my neck while I was gaming, which I do fairly heavily once I get home from work, with epic sessions occurring on the weekends. This pain actually eclipsed the pain in my shoulder most of the time and would easily result in my laying on the floor to try to make it go away.

A month and a half of constant pain later Amily convinced me to see the physical therapist she was seeing.

It took about 20 minutes for the full diagnosis:

The pain at the base of my neck is 100 percent due to extremely bad posture while using the computer at home. At work I am far more likely to sit properly as well as get up constantly for normal work related demands. At home, the “comfortable” sitting would kick into high gear and that would usually result in acute pain as my shoulders would slump forward in a slouch and my head would tip forward with my chin jutted out just enough that it was the equivalent of forcing my neck to hold up a 40lb weight. Disk compression is no joke.

As for the shoulder pain? That is where the real stupid comes in.

In my extreme wisdom I had decided to focus on working my pecs and anterior deltoid (chest and front facing shoulder muscle) and my medial deltoid (middle facing shoulder muscle). What I wasn’t working on at all was my posterior deltoid (rear facing shoulder muscle) or my trapezius (back muscles).

Why this is important is that this exacerbated a pre-existing muscle imbalance on my left side that would normally be dealt with when I’d do full balanced workouts before. This imbalance caused the head (ball end) of my humerus (upper arm bone) that rotates in the shoulder socket to actually get pulled upward and forward so significantly that it is grinding on ligament and muscle and nerves and bone.

From an results perspective, the exercises I was doing were SUPER EFFECTIVE, and I have been paying for that ever since as the imbalance it caused has been extremely difficult to back out of.

I’d call this a rookie mistake, but I am simply not a rookie. I clearly didn’t know better, or at least didn’t apply what I knew in a way that would have mattered. This one just goes down as raw stupidity.

The silver lining on this however has been that it forced me to see a physical therapist that has been able to put me on the right track to address my posture issues, which were easily the more important of the two issues I had going on. I’ll never be able to stop with the posture exercises lest my body return to its own ways and I get the computer slouch again. As I get older, this could easily become something far more severe and far more permanent.

As for the shoulder, I’ll get through this imbalance eventually, and it is a mistake I can ensure I never make again. Truth be told that when I find that I want to avoid a balanced workout because I hate working out the opposite half of a muscle group, it likely means I REALLY need to focus on that group even more. The aversion is likely the red flag that they are already far weaker than they should be.

Hindsight is 2020

With 2019 coming to a close and the figuratively endless possibilities of 2020 ahead of us, I decided that it was time once again to carve out a small space in the wilds of the Internet that Amily and I could call our own.

Truthfully, the trigger was actually a very well written and heartfelt post on Facebook that an old and distance friend wrote a few weeks prior. I actually commented to him that what he wrote was far too good for Facebook, which I largely view as an invasive PR front that encourages FOMO (fear of missing out) and divisionism farm more than it does deep and meaningful conversation and reflection.

For my part, I occasionally have things I want to say, ideas I want to share, or achievements I want to celebrate, but no particular audience with which I am inclined to do so with… And a space like this allows me to do so. I am not so dishonest as to claim that I do not occasionally like or crave praise, attention, and affirmation because we ALL do to varying degrees. But I am equally inclined to enjoy just doing a happy dance without an audience while I fist-pump to no one and exclaim excitedly into the solitude of the moment. A space like this is the digital expression of doing that.

May 2020 be precisely and exactly what it turns out to be.