Bratty Girl: When one pretend

When one pretend

February 16, 2008

It happens to all of us. We've thrown into circumstances where we have to pretend to be someone else. Like when you graduate from high school, go to college and pretend you're a college student. Or you get married and pretend you're a wife. Or you have a baby and pretend you're a mother. You ask for instruction manual and everybody chuckles.

You're in dead earnest.

So you face the days, one at a time. First, you overcome the initial incompetence, the sense that you're the wrong person in the wrong place and everyone's going to know. Slowly you realize that people take you at face value and you learn how to do the tasks assigned to the new person you're pretending to be. Sure, you fall on your face a few times, but gradually you discover your strengths. Maybe you're not like all the college students or the other wives or the other mothers, but as time goes on you fail less and less. Finally, you discover that while in the process of faking it, you've proved you're just as smart, just as good, just as witty, just as accomplished as anyone on the world! It's a great feeling, and it's happened to me, maybe ... twice. But that feeling is all the more significant for being rare.