Being found out

In his second autobiography, The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry expands upon the fact that he experienced rather a peculiar thing when he first came to the University of Cambridge, where he attended Queens' College. Namely, the defeating feeling that he would, at any time, be "found out".

This, he explains, had no relation to any fear of people realizing that he was homosexual, nor that he had a history of crime and imprisonment. Neither of those seemed to bother him as much as the real fear; that he would be "found out", and I realize the use of quotation marks will at some point begin to annoy, as being a big, fat, pretentious fraud. Surely, at some point, people would come up to him and question him about his knowledge of the great minds of the world, or theories of which he had never heard, and he'd be exposed. It would turn out that it had all been a mistake, he wasn't supposed to be there at all.

Although he never attributes this to his cyclothymia, that is the particular flavour of bipolar, or manic depressive, disorder from which he suffers, I cannot help but feel it is an odd coincidence.

There I go again, being melodramatic. Oh, how well his words suit my life, 'tis as if he was writing about me!

Bollocks, the lot of it. I might just as well have an emo haircut and listen to The Cure. In fact, if I were you, I'd stop reading right this instant. Go head, leave me to my arrogant wallowing.

Is he gone? Good, I hate that guy.

So anyway, I do not mean to say that his situation is directly applicable to mine. I only wish it to serve as a means of introducing the concept of this fear, which I do indeed share.

It might be at work, where I languish in fear that everyone will realize that I'm simply not good enough at what I do. I bring nothing to the table, so why am I even there? Someone more suitable would do it better!

In private, I cannot shake the feeling that people think I'm an arsehole. An annoying, self-centered twat. They'd rather not see me at all.

To be honest, my fear actually has less to do with a sincere beliefs that people holds these views of me, than that they should. 'tis oh so easy to dismiss the views of others. "Oh, they're just jealous because I'm so amazing!", or "They're simply arseholes themselves!". It's much harder to dismiss your own views. My friends don't say they don't like being around me, I tell myself that they should.

I can hardly imagine that anyone has scrapped more recordings of music they've made because they suck. Alright, I may be able to imagine it, but don't let that disrupt my hyperbole, please.

And they're not good enough because I'm not good enough, or at least that's what my head is telling me.

I'm not saying this to garner sympathy. Not that a single person will believe that, but I'm more interested in getting people to understand depression.