Also applies to being sick. I’ll be sick, but tell myself Im just trying to get out of work. But uh… no I’m generally just actually sick…

Sometimes, we bullshit ourselves by asking questions like this because we understand that the situation at hand (one being led to doubt their own lived experience, likely because of some internalised prejudice) is one where we don’t have agency.

I, for example, parsed the above image as relating to disability, because that’s where I most often doubt myself. I often worry that I’m faking, and also that I am faking worrying that I may be faking, and at the core of each of these anxieties is the fact that I sort of wish I were faking. It would reflect pretty poorly on me as a person if I were faking my disability, but at least in that world, I’d have agency. If I were faking, then it’d mean it’s me holding myself back from my dreams, instead of fucked up, systemic obstacles.

The crux of it is the question: would I rather be a decent person in a shitty world, or a shitty person in a decent world? I don’t get to choose what kind of world I live in, so unfortunately my only real choice is whether to be decent or shitty, given that it’s a shitty world. But imagining a world in which I am the shitty one and faking my difficulties, that allows me to entertain the prospect of a decent world that isn’t systemically fucked.

Ultimately it’s a foolish fantasy, but understanding how it derives from feeling desperate due to lack of agency in my life helps me to feel more sympathetic towards myself at least. The internal dynamics motivating your own question may look different to what I have described here, but regardless, you are valid and you deserve a better world than what we have here. Try to remember that, in order to avoid tearing yourself down as we all strive to tear down the unjust systems of oppression that cause these questions in the first place

you’re faking faking because you really just struggle to accept

You can only fake faking asking yourself, not fake asking yourself