The Me I've Made My Peace With

I am nothing.

A cipher.

An empty suit.

A thing of sound and fury, carefully calculated to signify nothing, calibrated to allow the viewer to read whatever he or she may want into me, without ever staking out any meaningful position of my own.

In this way I’m never held accountable.

In this way, I’m utterly forgotten the moment I step out of the room.

I try so desperately hard to be liked by everyone I might meet that I never manage to matter to anyone I might meet.

However much they might like me while I’m there.

And whilst this fact does kill me, I understand that it’s nobody’s fault but my own.

Because I am the captain of my ship, the master of my destiny, and if I’m too fucking cowardly to stand up and say “I’m real, I’m a real fucking person, and I matter too!” then who am I to complain when nobody knows it.

They never feel they need to know it, because I never bother to explain it properly to them.

I shouldn’t need to, if I’m a real person with real feelings to which attention must be paid, people should be able to figure it out on their own.

However, it’s nobody’s fault but mine that I deliberately cultivate an image wherein I’m no such person.

Because if every moment of my life, every action, every word, is an artfully designed construct, and every emotional beat I send out into the world, every feeling that I feel when I know that eyes are upon me, every joke and laugh, every moment of rage, yes, even my naked, hopeless, impotently furious moments of self-loathing, here upon the stage, are a put on, designed for the benefit of those who I know are watching, then it’s natural that they might think there’s nothing more to me than that.

An artful fiction, to be enjoyed and then safely forgotten.

Nothing more than a collection of witticisms and mannerisms, all gloss on the surface, surrounding a core that, at the end of the day, is found to be ultimately, inarguably empty.

But in spite of this, don’t worry. You’ll like me.

Because my greatest weakness is also my greatest strength.

And the fact that I am, on a fundamental level, incapable of connecting meaningfully with another human being means that, on the shallowest of levels, I connect with literally everyone.

And my desperate, pathetic need to be liked means that, in the short enough term, I am very likable.

And, at the end of the day, I’m so fucking fun at a bar that it would make you cry…