phony

June 10th, 2024

Last week, some guy called me a phony.

The details don’t matter. Personally, I feel like his assessment was incomplete and under-researched, a woefully short-sighted review.

But it’s funny how certain words and sentiments can get to us, so deep under our skin we can’t scratch it, regardless of whether the person saying them has any idea what they’re talking about.

When I first got into the restaurant industry, I learned something fast: if you were good at your job, you made more money. So I studied the people making the most money and I discovered the thing they all had in common: they were tremendous liars.

If you think I learned the wrong lesson, hold on, we’re not at that part yet.

I treated serving and bartending like an actor; all the fronts and backs of house are a stage. I was able to cultivate skills as a performer with that mindset, but I was also lying a lot, and those lies grew and bled outside my workplace, manifesting themselves into the worst possible version of myself that I could become.

As a writer and an artist, there was nothing more important to me than the truth. But for a long time, I was a fake, an intentional counterfeit of who I used to be.

I was a phony.

A lot of you know that I quit drinking some years ago (it was around the time you frequently mentioned I lost weight and made me very aware of a before & after), but putting down the bottle wasn’t the work.

The work was being honest again.

Honest with my family and my friends and my co-workers and, most difficult and important of all, honest with myself. I had to open myself up and bleed out the dark stuff from my veins, and infuse a little sincerity and humility and joy and sunshine back into my body.

It was a painful, necessary process, improving every part of my life. I’m really proud of the progress I’ve made and the person I am now.

And having a stranger call me fake, a phony, reminded me of what I used to be; then I was remembering those times and touching the edges of those feelings, sharp and ambivalent and numb.

My mistake was aspiring to be the people making the money. I should have been looking up to those who made where I was a better place; the people going above and beyond to help others, to conjure small moments of kindness, to foster connections and create community.

Instead I became a phony, a thing that still shows its face when I’m not careful, a thing I can put away but never destroy.