I’m pretending all the time to be, kinder, stronger, funnier, more sociable than I am. I guess we’re all like that but it just feels so inadequate.
What’s the difference?
I know it sounds flippant but… certain things are fundamentally performative. And other things are so close as makes no difference.
Kindness is performative. Actions are kind, and people are kind by performing those actions. You can’t “pretend” to be kinder than you are, you can only perform kindness or not perform kindness, and choosing to perform kindness is always worthwhile, no matter how much you may second-guess your motivations.
Strength is so many things. It takes strength to pretend a strength you don’t feel. And the way to achieve strength is to exercise it, so long as you do it in enough moderation to not strain or break anything. Being able to affect strength when necessary while being able to put it down again when that in turn is necessary is healthy. Everyone starts weight training with the littlest weights. It’s not fake or pretending to do what you gotta do in any given situation.
Funniness lives in the interlocutor, not in the speaker. It doesn’t matter how funny you think you are (or think you are pretending to be) – that’s not how it’s measured. At what point are you “pretending” to be a musician if the music still gets made? And often what it’s tempting to describe in first person as “pretending” is more accurately described in the third person as “practicing” – which is of course the way you cause things to Be.
Sociability is also performative. Pretending to be sociable is just…being sociable, despite a disinclination towards it. It’s making an effort towards something you value. So long as the effort is not so great that it backfires into resentment, there’s no practical difference.
Qualities or activities or whatever are no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them. If anything, the worthiness lies in the act of choosing. It’s not “pretending” – it’s agency.
tl;dr: ain’t nothing wrong with “fake it till you make it.” A plastic spoon* holds just as much soup as a “real” one
* I keep wanting to talk about semantic domains! Artifacts are defined by their utility, whereas living things are defined by their identity. So plastic forks are still forks, but plastic flowers aren’t flowers. So there’s two pep-talk messages to take away from this: (1) for certain things, the distinction between “fake” and “real” isn’t a relevant one so long as they still get the job done, and (2) the purpose of a living thing is to be the thing that it is. The idea of a “useless person” is as semantically nonsensical as the idea of “pretend kindness” (or fake cutlery).
I love this post. It illustrates what I think is maybe the key difference between a developing self-identity and a formed self-identity, which is, like…confidence? If you are BEING kind, consistently, if you are prioritizing that over your own comfort or fatigue or even, occasionally, your emotional inclination (because OH MY GOD FUCK THIS GUY, I HAVE HAD IT UP TO HERE–uuughhh, but no, I’m not gonna lash out at him, that won’t accomplish anything, and besides, he’s probably had a bad day, he’s under a lot of stress, I don’t have to be an asshole about this…), guess what? That makes you kind. That is literally what kindness is. Same for patience, same for strength, same for all of this stuff. You got it. You’re doing it. You’re not faking anything. Stop second-guessing yourself and cutting yourself down. Give yourself enough credit to look at your actions and confidently assert to yourself that you are no longer just making things up as you go.
I drew this poster for Jon Acuffand his FINISH book tour. Big thanks to Jon for this collaboration, his book has some great ideas about how to complete creative and life goals.
As much as I love all of this dearly, my main takeaway from the whole thing is “holy shit, I want to punch apart a piñata.”
I have been spared this particular feeling, via the expedient of never having had any goals to speak of. The “you have to actually keep living” problem, though, is a pretty universal one, and one I’m very familiar with, thanks to the aforementioned lack of momentum thing I’ve got going on. So what you do is you get up and find a reason to act; and if pressure’s gone, and fear’s gone, and even the completionist urge isn’t there because you’ve run out of rungs on your ladder, then the next thing you do is find a rabbit and chase it. It doesn’t matter what it is. Find a scent. In the name of that fierce, bloody-mouthed joy for which there is probably a specific German word, go out and kill something.
When asked, Ms. Frizzle denies that she “knows everything”
However, Ms. Frizzle always knows what her students are up to, knows the answer to every question they ask her, and never shows fear even when in extreme mortal peril, as if she’s experienced this all before
Although we know she was in a rock band called the Frizzlettes and was a Shakespearean actress, Ms. Frizzle’s childhood remains mysterious
Ms. Frizzle is EXACTLY the sort of person to travel back in time to teach herself, and is in fact the most likely fictional character to do so
Nobody is ever named “Valerie Frizzle” at birth
Ms. Frizzle dresses queerly and laughs at her own bad jokes
A lot of the series is about Arnold learning to take chances, make mistakes, and get messy – that phrase is more or less targeted at him as a student
Ms. Frizzle looks a lot like a grown-up Arnold
Holy shit???????
She literally has a giant storeroom full of barrels of pickles because she loves pickles so much what more evidence do you need
What relation do pickles have with the transgender community?
One of the medications used in hormone therapy for trans women (spironolactone, which counteracts testosterone) has the side effect of, putting it crudely, making you have to pee all the goddamn time. That causes dehydration and loss of electrolytes.
Pickles and pickle juice turn out to be a fairly convenient and flavorful way of satisfying an electrolyte craving. Those who’ve been on spiro a long time can develop a nigh-spiritual bond with ‘em.
dope
holy FUCK i knew ms. frizzle wasn’t straight but i never THOUGHT to consider that she wasn’t cis how could i be so BLIND
All characters are self-insert characters. They are you a little to the left, or a particular piece of you dialed up to 11, or the you that you would have been if the path of your life had angled just slightly differently, or you if you never learned this one important thing.
Every character is part of you, but more than that every character starts with a piece of you, big or small, it’s you in one way or another at the beginning. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact it’s essential. That seed of you, that lives in them, it’s what gives them life, breath and blood and bone. And then you tend it, growing it, shaping them along paths you could never have walked nor imagined for yourself. Until they become someone else entirely. A wholly fictional character. But also you, a little bit, somewhere in there in the heart of themselves.
Every character is a self-insert character. It’s only a matter of degrees how much of yourself there is in them when you finally put them out into the world. Stop worrying so much about self-inserts. Worry more about putting that little you into a story that will shape them into a big, beautiful character.
SING, patrick wolf // I’LL BE GOOD, jaymes young // THE BEGINNING SONG, the decemberists // KEEPING WARM, we were promised jetpacks // HARD AS HELLO, kimberly anne // LEVEL UP, vienna teng // THIS IS WHY WE FIGHT, the decemberists // WALK THROUGH WALLS, kyla la grange // FORCES OF THE UNSEEN, cloud cult // ONCE THERE WAS A HUSHPUPPY, dan romer & benh zeitlin
just moving along like everyone else 