Influenza

Why The Fake Physician Assistant Story Hit A Nerve!

Everybody has an opinion about Angel Victoria Murdoch this week. If you missed it, she is a social media personality and reality show alum who spent close to two years posting content about life as a Physician Assistant student at Duke University, the birth of the PA program. Get ready with me for rotations. What is in my PA school bag? Then actual students in the program started asking why nobody had ever seen her, and Duke’s cohort historian has no record of her presence. In fact, the historian notes that she documented every aspect of her own journey and suspects that’s where Murdoch was able to extract information for her content.

So the internet did what the internet does. Think pieces. Video essays. Strangers diagnosing her childhood. People who have never met this woman explaining, in detail, exactly who she is at her core.

And I keep watching all of it thinking the same thing.

Y'all are lying too.

THE LIE YOU GOT AWAY WITH

Here is what nobody wants to say out loud. Most of us are sitting on something. Somebody reading this told a man he is the father of a child that is not his. Somebody let a whole family believe a degree got finished when it never did. Somebody has been claiming an allergy for fifteen years because it is easier than saying I do not like it. Somebody had an affair in 2011 and buried it so deep they have almost convinced themselves, it never happened.

Those lies did not get a Reddit thread. Nobody made a video breaking down the timeline. They just sat there, quietly, doing damage in the dark. That is the only real difference. Not the size of it. Not the harm. Just whether or not you got caught.

I hear the pushback already. Come on now, faking Duke is not the same as a exploiting peanut allergies.

Let's actually sit with that.

The food lie means someone plans a whole dinner around you and you let them. The paternity lie means a man raises a child, spends his money, gives his heart, and builds an entire identity on information you controlled. The degree lie means the people who love you celebrated something that never happened. The infidelity lie means your partner is making decisions about their own life with half the facts.

Every one of those lies has a victim. Every one of those took maintenance. Because that is the part people forget. A lie is not one moment. It is a job. You have to keep it fed. You have to remember what you said and to who. Two years of pretending to be in a PA program is a lot of work, and so is twenty years of keeping a story straight at Thanksgiving.

So which one is bigger? I would argue none of them. They all come from the same place, which is a person deciding that the version of themselves that is actually true is not good enough. That is not a character flaw unique to influencers. That is Tuesday.

WHY SO MUCH SMOKE?

Now, I am not saying she should not be criticized. She should. When you build a public brand on a credential you do not have, you are borrowing trust from people who earned that credential the hard way. The students who actually sat in those seats, paid tuition and lost sleep have every right to be furious. What I am questioning is the appetite.

We love a public lie because it is safe. It costs us nothing. We can be outraged all afternoon and never once look at our own inventory. Judging a stranger is the cheapest moral workout there is. You get the feeling of having integrity without doing any of the actual work of having integrity. And the dogpiling is not accountability. It is entertainment

WE SEE THIS IN BEAUTY

Here is the part I have not seen anybody talk about, and it is the reason this story resonated with me. I do hair for a living. Which means dishonesty is not an abstract topic for me. It is a Tuesday afternoon problem I have to solve before I touch somebody's head.

I have had clients look me in the eyes and tell me they have never had a relaxer. Never used box color. Never put anything on their scalp but water and love. And then I get in there and the hair tells me something completely different, because hair can’t lie.

I have asked when the last retightening was and been told six weeks when it was clearly five months. I have asked about medications and health changes. The answer is “nothing.” Meanwhile, there is anemia, high blood pressure, diabetes, and a recent weight loss surgery in the mix.

None of those people think of themselves as liars. They are embarrassed. Maybe they think it doesn’t matter or are worried about judgement. Having a low blood count doesn’t make you a villain, but it could be the reason your hair is shedding.

But here is what they are actually doing. They are handing me a chemical decision and withholding the information I need to make it safely. Color over undisclosed color is not a small oops. That is breakage, and chemical damage that takes eighteen months to grow out. That is somebody crying in the car recording a three part TikTok video about how incompetent the salon is.

So a real part of this job, a part nobody puts in the cosmetology curriculum, is deciphering. Reading the hair against the story and figuring out which one to believe. Asking the same question three different ways. Watching how somebody answers, not just what they answer. Building enough trust in the first ten minutes that a person will admit the thing they walked in planning to hide.

Because that is what most lying is. Performance. Murdoch was performing a version of her life she wanted to be true. So is the client telling me she shampoos weekly. The stakes are different, the scale is different, the mechanism is exactly the same.

INTEGRITY

Integrity is not a thing you have. It is a thing you keep doing,when nobody is looking. It is telling your friend the truth about why you cancelled brunch. It is telling your partner the thing that will disappoint them. It is telling your stylist you used box dye. It is admitting you never finished, you never went, you never did it, and letting people look at you while they absorb the reality.

This is hard! And it is exactly why a story about a woman who did not do it goes viral, because deep down it makes people nervous. So before you post your take, ask yourself the quieter question.

What have you been telling people for ten years that is not true? And who is still building their life around it?

Thank you for reading. 

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