“Man is a make-believe animal—he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part,” William Hazlitt once said.
* * *
It sucks to be a man, if William Hazlitt’s words are true; a man is stuck in his dreams and grasps his true identity only when he is being another person—that is, when he is “acting a part.”
.
.
.
Unless Hazlitt actually meant “acting on the stage,” which I highly doubt, we people act everyday. Even if we are facing one of the most boring and mundane course of a day, as we do somewhat everyday, we act in front of our own sets of audience; you don’t even have to be a popular celebrity in order to have a wide range of diverse audience; you don’t even have to be a speech maker or any kinds of people who are in more interacting environment. In fact, chances are, no matter who you are, you will have a set of audience to show your own little performance of “acting.”
Let’s talk more about the acting part of what Hazlitt said: we have many roles in our lives. Take in “students” as an example. As a student myself, I think I have as many as fifty shades of Yoon—that is, I have many different sides of me as I interact with different set of people. When I am with my peers, I tend to be more uncensored. When I am in a class though with adults, I act more polite and respectful (not that I am very rude to all other non-adults). This is an oversimplified version of my interacting with other individuals, since I have different groups of friends and teachers, and I have other big groups of people other than the ones in school. Also, I have various situations that I face everyday that I handle differently from some other situations.
And, due to our excessive dose on acting like such mentioned above, we face identity crisis, I think. Of course, we act as “the person” that we partly are, but we are not truer than ever when we are acting apart. As exemplified by numerous celebrities and politicians, the roles that they take are likely to crash every now and then. We commonly see those celebrities going to jail for drug usage, and driving while drunk, and we commonly see those politicians going to jail for cheating on their wives and husbands and for engaging in elicit activities. It is not a huge surprise for us to see aforesaid events appear on news shows. We would sometimes like to be that persons we take a part in, but we fail numerously in doing so.
We are partly “make-believe animals,” but we are partly not. We do act everyday, but we do not shape ourselves into those pseudo identities we chose to act in. I think we are rather more true selves when we are by ourselves. hate to admit that I am such a person, but I am unavoidably me when I am at home
alone. I let go of those social expectations and very standards of an academic and upright high school girl. I let go those of a daughter and of a friend. I would really, really love to be one of those socially admirable people, but I am not. I try hard (maybe not) to “act” and be the kind of person I act like, but I am not, and I don’t think it is just me who thinks this way.
And, above all, it doesn’t suck at all to be a man (woman).
Words (603)