Faking Good
Portola Valley, CA 5 June 2000
Writing now feels like such an awful choice. What happened? For so long it was energizing and so crucial to me. How did I lose my focus? Maybe it was becoming too difficult, too draining to hold on to the inauthenticity of my life as it is, as it was. I push others in my work very hard. Yet, who pushes me? What would my life be like if I had a me to coach or mentor me when I was younger?
I can ill afford to go there now. If I were to write my biography, I think I would call it The Self Authored Life – the Tortuous Journey of Making It Up in the Moment. That is how I feel at times – like now. That I am making it up. That I am relinquishing the hard work of authentic inquiry and building community. That I am “faking good”.
Maybe that would be an even better title for the biography, Faking Good. Great title for a novel about a man in his fifties whose life is slowly coming apart. Too slowly for his friends to see. Each one sees a different facet of the man. Seven narrators each describing the man from a different view. Each one holds a unique piece to the puzzle. Each one holds some secret information. Each one is invested in their own delusions about how well he is doing.
How would the novel end? Not sure. It begins at his funeral, though. Well, at his wake really. They all, all seven of them, find themselves together there. A strange realization comes over them – that this is the first time they are all together at the same time in the same place. Who would be there? His son? A friend from childhood? Someone who witnessed his moral cowardice? Someone who felt saved by his integrity? A former lover? A teacher? Who would be the seventh?
The unfolding of a life lies in the telling. How would I tell his story? How would it be both truthful and a lie? What if at the end of the tale the narrator, mistrustful at first, comes to find that this character wasn’t “faking good” after all? Maybe in his own time he comes to find that “good” is not the product of some calculation, but the realization of some essential, innate quality.
I began writing this entry with a sense of labor. As usual, the writing itself freed me up more than I had expected. It always does that.