I Literally Don't Know What the Hell I'm Doing

I've caught myself saying this a lot lately. I think it even more than I say it. It’s new territory for me, for sure. I'm most comfortable with my head down and my feet on the ground. I like to know what I'm doing. Or rather, I like to have deceived myself into believing I know what I'm doing. The phrase "fake it till you make it" makes my skin crawl. I find it quite honestly to be a ridiculous request to be made of me.

Me? My own worst enemy. My biggest critic. You want me to pretend I can do something I’m not 100% sure I can do successfully?

Hard pass.

Until the inevitable day I wake up and realize that all the things I already know how to do and can say for the most part I am not faking it through are things that I kind of hate and they are sucking my soul out through my ass.

I’m not thrilled at the idea of faking anything. Yet, there always seems to come a time when I reach a breaking point and I just know I can’t go on living my life in a safe zone where I only pursue things I already know I can do successfully.

And what's the worst that could happen if I take a leap? After all, at one point I knew even less than I know now, right? I made it through that.

Well, more or less made it through. I’m still here anyways.

But back to the part where I literally don't know what the hell I'm doing. I really don't. Do you?

When do we really go from the "faking it" to the "making it"? How do you measure that exactly? I started writing. Can I call myself a writer? What does it take to claim something as your thing? To really build yourself into the person you want to be?

Is it enough to just feel confident in your skill and really believe you can do it and do it well? Or is it enough to just to keep doing the damn thing even if you aren't getting recognition and it's not lucrative and for all you know you might totally suck at it.

Is that how you claim something? Is that how you reinvent yourself? Who the hell knows. I sure don't.

I want to be self-made. I want to be my own boss. I, like every other millennial right now, am part of the cliché that may someday define my generation. I want so desperately to get out from under the American capitalist or corporate or whatever shitty structure is responsible for putting us into jobs that we spend years in despite feeling like there's no real room for growth there. And truth be told we don't know if we wanted to grow there anyways or if the choice to stay is simply because it felt like the "adult" thing to do.

I want to be happy.

So I'm scrambling.

I'm pulling together every bit of knowledge and skill I've scraped together over the years and throwing it together into what feels more like a trash heap than any kind of useful portfolio or resume that might actually say to people "Hi there, I'm Ariel and I definitely know what I'm doing."

I don't know what I'm doing and I've never been very good at faking it.

Freelancing is hard. This isn't my first time.

It seems that the trend through my 20s was that every few years or so I'd have an existential crisis about what the hell I was doing with my life, quit a job and spend the next year trying out odd jobs and random gigs for money while I figured out what it was I really did want since clearly it wasn't what I already had.

(And yes I am well aware how fortunate I am to have the ability to do that. I know what it feels like to be trapped in the dead end job cycle and the ability to actually take a step back and a step out is undoubtedly a privilege.)

I literally don't know what the hell I'm doing. If you also don't, well, I can't say you're in good company but you're in my company at least. Maybe we'll figure it out someday or maybe we will spend our entire lives not knowing what the hell we're doing. Hey, at least we're self-aware right?

We can't be the only ones.

Millionaires go broke. Fortune 500 companies fail. (A lot of them actually. Give that a google. That percentage blew my mind.) And at this point everyone is canceled. Yes, you. You are also canceled.

"Fake it till you make it" isn't real. It's just a thing people say and the older I get the more I hate it. Yes, I know most people probably just use this to mean stay positive, have faith in yourself, but I still hate it. It gives the illusion that there will be a day when I have everything figured out and will be completely and utterly confident and it's a lie.

No one has "made it." No one can "make it" fully, completely, and indefinitely. If they "made it," all that really means in actuality is that they are making it for now and probably still on some level are wondering if anyone has noticed that they don't know what the hell they're doing.

For me it's not a matter of confidence really. I can be confident and still say I literally don't know what the hell I'm doing. I am confidently saying I literally don't know what the hell I'm doing.

And yet, here I am.

I’m writing this.

And I'm putting myself out there and I'm trying new things.

And I don't know what the hell I’m doing. And I can pretty much guarantee a week from now, or a month, or a year, I still won't know what the hell I'm doing and I'm not faking it. There's nothing to fake.

We all came into this world not knowing what the hell we were doing and a lot of us on some level never feel like we totally got it figured out and that's okay. I'm coming to grips with it anyways.

I want to be okay with feeling like I'm free falling sometimes. I want to be okay with trying something brand new despite the fact that I might end up sucking at it, or no one may ever see it or care. Or it may never make me money or gain me notoriety.

And I don't want to worry about "faking it." I want to say confidently, I don't know what I'm doing, but that's okay I am still going to try and I will learn as I go and I will always be learning.

I literally don't know what the hell I'm doing and there's no end to that in sight. There will always be something I don't know, some skill I have yet to acquire. Something that makes me uncomfortable. Some mystery left to solve and that's okay.

I literally don't know what the hell I'm doing but rather than run from that or try to cover it up and fake it I think I'll just lean into it.

The only thing I've ever been 100% sure of is that I'm not 100% sure of anything and I'm starting to feel more comfortable in that than I would've ever expected.