How many of you get this response?  I certainly do and it creates a tangle of reactions in me.  On one hand I feel like an impersonator – that I’ve been misrepresenting myself to the world.  As one friend recently revealed to me “I have been faking it . . . and,” she added, “it is so painful.”  So that is another reaction.  The raw ache of being required by an extrovert-worshiping culture to act inauthentically in order to fit in, be successful, be liked, be heard and seen.  Of course many of us were faking it – that was an adaptive coping mechanism.   Continue reading →