(some days i suspect i come across like michael scott on "the office")
Sometimes I meet people and I get the impression that they don't even know how much they're wearing their hearts to the outsides of their clothes. The arrogant ones, especially, do funny things to my own heart (which someone once told me was like a kaleidoscope; I don't or can't hide it, she said, but who can tell what it says or means or is, except that it's full of color and glitter; whether it's accurate or not, I like that description, so I'll put it here-- if true, I don't think this metaphor should be taken to mean that I'm some super special person who's just so much more complex than her peers, only that I'm...kaleidoscopey. Fragmented and flighty and full of things that don't go comfortably together). But yeah, when I meet some other kid and they're trying so so so so hard to be impressive or charming or intimidating and the Dunning-Kruger effect is out and upon them in its full tragicomic splendor and there's the arrogance, the arrogance that I so badly want to tease and puncture and use against them or just turn away from in disgust, but also there's this clear need to be cool in the eyes of another person or group of people , this need to be percieved in a particular way, this desire to be a certain special kind of person, the kind who is wanted or loved or feared or admired or just noticed-- and I understand that need, that desire. I think most of us do. Who reading this has not ever consciously manipulated others' opinions of her in some way or other? Who hasn't shown off? Who hasn't pretended to be someone else, even just secretly to himself, someone better than the person he believed was really him, and believed was not and would never be good enough for much of anything at all?
I mean, I've pretended to know more about certain subjects than I actually do, or did at the time; as a young teenager I retold a lot of jokes I didn't quite understand because they made other people laugh, and made other people treat me a little bit more like a normal person and potential friend. I've read books that I thought would make me look very smart, or very deep, or very edgy and underground-trendy conspicuously in very public places-- cover prominently displayed, up in front of me like a shield, and me reading and oddly self-conscious about the act of reading, hoping my hair looked okay and that my facial expression bespoke contemplation rather than jitteriness, boredom, or mental impairment; I've sat that way for a long time, waiting for someone interesting and wonderful to notice me and come to me and talk to me about my book. I put effort into my appearance. I've wished I were and tried, in one way or another, to imitate: characters from novels and characters from films and musicians and writers and artists, and professors I admire, and older girls who went to my high school and seemed almost like they had walked out of one of the novels or films I loved in high school, and with whom I desperately wanted to become friends.
I understand. It's not that the world is full of phonies mixed in with a few handfuls of genuine, unpretentious, honest folk. The world is full of actors and fabulists and performance artists and masked dancers. That's all of us. It's only that some are more skilled at it than others, and some are more self-aware with regard to their performance. And I guess what I'm saying is that when I meet someone and this person spends a long time talking about how she's "a genius" (maybe so, but this is probably not the best thing to announce right off the bat to a couple of semi-strangers), and has "a short-term photographic memory" (and I don't tell her that most people can remember numbers, facts, and detailed images for fifteen or twenty minutes if they make an effort to do so and aren't distracted by anything), and is nicknamed "Aisling, because it means 'dreamer'" (I do point out that she's butchering the pronunciation of "Aisling," though I don't use the word "butcher" and I try to be kind and careful about my correction), and has strong intuitive abilities such that her first impressions of people are "almost always right" and she once made someone cry by verbally analyzing and dismantling her personality and behavior with merciless thoroughness (I almost point out that insults, if cruel or relentless enough, can make lots of people cry, even when the insults aren't remotely true or are generic enough to hit soft, insecure places in most psyches, and that anyway, even if you are somehow actually a genuine honest-to-God telepath, it's fucking mean to make people cry just because you can do it, just to make them understand that you're more powerful than they are-- it's mean and it's tacky), when someone says those things to me, I can't just make fun of her or get pissed off at her. I might do both of those things a little bit, silently and on the inside of me, my private rooms of skull and rib. But mostly I ache for the way she wants to be liked and the way she hasn't figured out how to make people like her, and the way she probably thinks she's just not good enough, good enough for anybody without all that bragging and lying, the way she's convinced herself she's being charming and sophisticated and impressing everyone when all the while there are the strings-- we see the strings like fishing wire, sad and stupid-- and she's a vulnerable marionette done up as a magician or ballet dancer.
Because there's no way I can watch that and not see myself.
And then I see that it's everyone in college, and then I see that it's everyone in the whole world.
We're dripping blood down our sweaters. Our hearts thump and shift against acrylic yarn. We need acting lessons so bad, and only intermittently do we even understand that enough to be embarrassed.