pretending / performing

who am i when i am alone? easy breazy. slow moving. languid. unrushed. relaxed. indulgent. explicitly focused on relaxing. feeding creative spaces. but also thinking. always thinking. about everything. many levels deep.

"One's thoughts on everything to absolutely no one."

yes.
this is the essense of what i am talking about.

while you say that youve lived a life of lies and deception, i would counter that i took the opposite approach. lies came so easy to me that i hated them. lies to my parents about where and what i was doing, lies about why i was late, with everything. lies mainly lived there to avoid drama, but there were so many through high school that i grew distasteful of them all and stopped it when i got to college. is that girl my girlfriend? yes mom. and then i would suffer the maelstrom of screams and guilt that would get slammed at me, one thing after another, cries of betrayal, comments designed to cut, and dagger ridden looks of disgust.

but all of this was better than getting tangled up in my own lies.

the thing about lying is that in order to preserve one, you must continue to craft others. and seriously, i have so much running through my mind that its often too much trouble to craft lies and sustain them. and my parents who knew me better than anyone, again, very morally intact people, who only ever wanted my best, who only ever cared about me, them... i decided that lying wouldnt take me anywhere. i hated being someone i wasnt, and i hated disgracing them that way.
and more often than not, they could tell anyway.

i am a sagitarrius, and the sagitarrius is always in pursuit of the truth. its a life long journey to discover and unfold truth, it is always hidden, methaphoric, evasive. in order to do so, i took the honest approach. but this isnt so much about something moral, as much as it gets into an entirely different phenomenon:

the truth, is stranger than fiction.

i have lived something of a fantastical life. some very weird interesting fascinating incarnations have taken place over the last 10 years and to try to sort it out, to organize through the people i am with around and among is rather mind consuming. it fascinates even as it confounds. ive taken truth to another plateau, i always have so many strings of exploration going that there are curtains everywhere, not because i am afraid to be seen, but because i dare people to see me and make sense of it. people are very simple, they want to organize and box things into easy to understand categories... but i am not easily boxed into anything. as soon as it seems like i am, something else comes out of my mouth that shreds that understanding to pieces. people are multi layered. there isnt one person here, there are many folds, many evolutions, many lives that we live out every day. so i simply pick from this orchard of stories, places ive been, things i have seen and divulge. this is the point that i identify with the pretender. give someone a piece of truth, and they themselves will carry it away into an infinite sea of possibilities, off spins, fantasies about what i would do if i did this or that, what i am like if ive been this or that..

but they never believe me. it is way too strange and unreal that i am and have been and done the things ive done. they think i am making it up. but the shit that i have undergone would be impossible to make up. and so another question.. do i live the life that i live because it is who i am, or is it for another reason, so that i will have the stories i have, so that i can spin the fantasies i spin, so that i can have something new to talk about, think about, or suck someone new in with?

because here is where it gets messy. heres a hint, theres a possibility, the taunting we give people to go ahead and try to figure it out, because we have all our lives tried and still can't quite, is much more intoxicating than whats underneath. then eventually you have to ask. if i never let others get close enough to see whats underneath, is there anything underneath after all?

honesty and truth confuse people. we are all trying so hard to hide that when you come across something like me, it makes no sense in the paradigm of manipulation we live out of. brutal honesty i embrace. i give it to every one in my space, and most of all to myself.

but i can only ever see myself from the inside. i can only ever see with one set of eyes, eyes that are shaded different colors from my past. i understand the nature of perception and interpretation... there is every truth in the world, so there is ultimately no real truth, only versions of it. people will always see what they want to see. i am always keenly interested in what others see in me. it has less to do with wanting to please people or being overy concerned with their opinions of me as much as it has to do with wanting to see a different version of what i see. in this i have adently trained myself to see from the outside as much as possible, to see what comes across when i separate out and look from the outside in.

i have never particularly considered myself to be a pretender. i have, however, *always* been a performer. being self aware to the extent that i am, i can see how i perform, all the time. this is what gets me sometimes.. when i was younger there were many accusations of manipulation and selfishness. these days it is not so. ive somehow learned to keep it all under wraps, ive somehow learned to be honest enough that people see this and little else. most charming when i am unconcious to it. excedingly potent there most of all, and i end up with strange versions of fascinations from people everywhere. my guy friends fall in love with me, straight women fall in fascination with me, my coworkers start to fantacise about me and i realize there is something about me that is incredibly gravitational. i also value my alone time, over the years i have learned that i need to have it to survive, all that you say here.. but it comes more from burning out on performing, from burning out on all the stories and dramatics that i weave into the course of everyday events just to keep the mundanity of life at bay, than from seeking out solitude on my own. divulgence of everything i am from the inside also brings with it a version of slight paranoia. what now that you know this or that, and how will that color the way you see and interact with me? worrying about this frustrates me and eventually i just retreat into my dark below ground playground of an apartment with books and weed, poetry and paintings, wine and cigarettes and bake for a few days, until i get sick of that and reemerge, forgetting what ive said before, on purpose. see, we are all so self absorbed that when you forget yourself, others do too. most don't even pay attention that deeply to get it, most don't try. and so, another day, another playground, another person, another dance. the nature of undulating life.

and really.. pretending loses its effectiveness after a certain point. theses greater men and greater women.. have so much more to say than most. they have seen everything from challenging their egos and acknowledging their many complexities that the truth becomes much more fodder for expressing who we are, who we've been and who we could be than anything. and that is the crux of this. there is so much to who i am, there is so much to who you are, that no one, or most no one could ever really know everything. that is the part we keep. so are we keeping it private, or are we simply not finished explaining everything? is there ever any way to ever show everything? i dont think so.

strangely enough throwing truth after truth into people faces confounds them. it is hard to make sense of it all. it all comes from who i am. and i know who i am to the extent that i understand that there is so much to show that showing pieces here or there will only bring more curiosity. the point is that a performer exists for her audience, and after a point loses touch with what the core really is. if sounding boards of other people are the only way to start to see what that audience sees, to gain feedback on what is working and what is not, then when is what i see ever quite completly real? back and forth it goes, if your opinion is the only feedback i have, then when can i ever trust myself to see things as clearly as they are? what is ever as it is with no shades of interpretation? nothing. ever. is devoid. of interpretation.

everyone. comes. with shades on.
"One's thoughts on everything to absolutely no one."

feed the world your stories, your insights, your truth, your observations, and they will swarm like flies. it is the charismatic in its true form, no? ideals, grand thoughts, exciting adventures, variety, always the promise of something more, something bigger, something deeper, something still yet untapped. you can never be quite known, quite defined, quite seen. there is so much material that you will never get through it all with one person. its a test on some level. do you see me? are you sure? how do you react, how do you engage it, how do you take it in, and what do you spit back at me for it?

at this, the audience loses its face, its definition, its identity. everyone is an audience. everyone is a new possibility for something i haven't seen yet, a version i haven't heard yet. otherwise, what have you to offer, how do you stand out, and what makes me want to come out of my little world of exciting illusions to tap into yours? very often, with most people, there is not much to discover. to see or to learn. to surrender to.

perception is reality. a dare. a sigh. a soulful look. the masks are real on some level arent they, they are simply different versions of who i am. thats what i mean by do we ever stop pretending. i believe i am real, but nothing is ever completely real. i believe what i say, but when can i trust that what i say bears nothing outside of a need for more attention? back to the many selves, back to the masks... they serve a purpose.

but who do you think you are fooling? humanity shares some basic underlying qualities. we are all the same, at the very core. we all want to love and be loved. we all want to be accepted. we are all afraid of something, and we all have lost painfully along the way. anyone with an open eye can see everything. thats what i come down to. who do you think you are fooling? they already see you. perhaps i am the only one that thinks otherwise. perhaps i am the only one that doesn't grasp this dimond in the coal of who i have been and where i am going. validation then becomes something paramount and the performer/pretender must on some level attain it to really know inside that it all lines up. this is what takes us back outside, to the masses of willing victims to these stories and swirling fabrics. to continue to live, then express, what we have seen. we need someone to respond. otherwise, the core loses meaning. its just an actor on an empty stage. no props. no costumes. no audience.

meltdown.
and the cycle continues.

timing. implementation. alone time. re-emergance and once again a dance.

getting lost in that meltdown has been something ive tripped out on many times. i know that if i could twist it all out in the right way i could lead masses. but along the way i get lost. spinning till i get dizzy and fall down, watching the sky move above, and feeling the ground move below.

i know if i could stop the spinning, and walk forward in a straight line, i could be very close to unstoppable.

i could lead armies.
and always win.