Confessions of A Fake Teenage Goth

A guest post from Valerie

The first guest post I’ve ever had is from Valerie, a woman I met a few months back during a picnic meetup in Austin. I was immediately struck by her singular and passionate personality. Valerie is the writer of Val’s Pals. She is a talented writer, and while I know a lot of talented writers, what is rare about Valerie is her unbridled sincerity and enthusiasm. Her honest search for answers. So many people become enamored with the idea of themselves, and their writing takes on the pretension of someone who wants to be seen as a Guru or a Thought Leader. Their writing becomes brittle as a result. Valerie simply is, and her substack is an exploration of someone who is very interested in becoming. Anyone who has attempted such a thing knows how difficult it is to do.

Confessions of A Fake Teenage Goth

Ask anyone from my high school if I was goth, and they’ll say I was goth, but not a real goth. I think that’s a fair description. I had the red lipstick and the angst and the penchant to listen to Bring Me the Horizon on repeat, but I also had a perfect GPA and a love for Taylor Swift and a complete lack of knowledge about what it meant to be goth, aside from wearing black.

In short, I was an imposter, a fraud, a tried and true bona fide fake goth. I wish I could tell you the story ends there, but of course it doesn’t. By the time I graduated from college, I had reached into the cookie jar of identities multiple times and stolen a number of flavors when no one was watching: witchcraft, math research, software engineering, girlfriend to lawyers, novelist, consultant, economics student.

I remember my witch phase fondly. There was this Facebook group that a witch in my neighborhood had started. She was a cashier for a spice shop, which I found rather fitting. All the witches in her group believed that stones could give you magical powers, that all it took to become rich was burning specific types of candles, that charging water under the full moon would make you fearless.

“HAVE YOU BLED YOUR ATHAME?” one post read. “IN ORDER TO BE LINKED TO YOUR ATHAME, YOU MUST LET IT PIERCE YOU. ONLY THEN WILL YOU BE ONE WITH THE KNIFE.”

That year, I watched The Craft, the quintessential witch movie from the 90’s, and stocked up on Killstar clothing and various crystal pendants. Then, with that preliminary research in place, I wrote a lot of stories about witches who smelled really good, think sage and rainwater and incense, and cast spells on boys who broke their hearts. I wasn’t sure what real witches actually smelled like. Maybe they smelled like cinnamon and pekoe tea and vanilla instead, but even if that were the case, I’d still write about witches smelling like sage and incense instead. What mattered most was not the essence itself but the idea of the essence, you see. If people couldn’t smell you and see that you were different, then why bother with that identity anyways?

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My “witch” phase lasted for about two years. By the end of the phase, despite having accumulated maybe thirty or forty lacy, witchy tops, I still had no idea what witches actually believed. And keep in mind that by this point, I had also visited Salem, Massachusetts twice. If I really wanted to, I could’ve asked any witch on the street what they believed, but the thought never occurred to me to make my passion more legitimate. After all, why be a witch when you could simply look like one?

A few months after that phase ended, I dated some guy who had just broken up with a girl named Stella. Stella was quite bitter about the way things ended (in retrospect, I don’t blame her, but you have to understand that I did not have a brain back then) and got really upset with me. So of course, like any girl who does their research on romantic competitors properly, she found out some of my weaknesses and circulated them.

“Valerie calls herself a witch, but she’s not even a real witch! She doesn’t actually know anything about them.”

Stella was right. I was a fucking fake witch. And a fake novelist (wrote a 20,000 word draft before quitting) and a fake math researcher (felt insecure about my lack of career plans, so entertained ideas of being a PhD student) and a fake software engineer (talked a big game about becoming a Google engineer but was too scared to apply there) and a fake girlfriend to lawyers (law seemed romantic but all the lawyers on Tinder ghosted me) and a fake consultant (still have no idea what McKinsey does) and a fake economics student (what is supply and demand anyways?).

In short, I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed about all of my identities, and talked and talked and talked about them to everyone around me, only to realize later that while the idea of these identities intoxicated me, I couldn’t realize any of them. At some point, turning a dream into real life requires turning the crank of reality. And at that point, the difference between what someone wants to do and what someone is willing to do becomes clear. As much as I liked the idea of eating fancy cheeses at McKinsey dinners or getting to tell people that I worked at Google, I was unwilling to put in the work.

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The thing about identity is that it’s comforting. Getting to tell someone I’m an Ivy League student, or that I study representation theory at grad school, or that I’m dating a partner at a law firm feels like I have a security blanket for my life. I wanted an identity I could feel warm and fuzzy in, and I thought that I could have whatever label I wanted for free. But of course, I was being naive.

I’m starting to realize that I can’t choose my preferences, no matter how badly I’d like to. This has been an extremely infuriating realization at points. Some nights I still wish I could be a Google software engineer and work twenty hours a week and have to remind myself that I’m not wired for that sort of life. And other nights I wish I were a published author like some of my friends, before I begrudgingly remember that I hated pulling my teeth on long-ass drafts.

This is all to say that I am still working on accepting my limitations and revealed preferences. Is it working? A bit. I can truthfully say that I don’t want to date lawyers anymore and that the idea of being a PhD student makes me vomit. I think this is good progress, actually. And who knows? Maybe I’ll even accept myself fully before the time I’m dead.

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