Pretend - That's How Everything Works

the cost of pretending

“To fall asleep, you must pretend to be asleep first, and that’s how everything works.”

When I first read this sentence I was floored. I’m not sure I can even tell you why. Pretend, put yourself there until it comes true. Even in sleeping. Just be the person you want to be.

Is it that easy? Or is there a cost? A side effect to pretending? To the space between who we are and who we want to be -

I know that distance intimately. I know what it means to live slightly away from my own skin, slightly away from the truth of who I am, performing myself instead of being myself. Maybe that’s why the “pretend to fall asleep” line gutted me, because I realized how long I’d been pretending in order to survive. Pretending in order to sleep. To rest. To belong. Pretending to be the person I thought I needed to be just to get through the world.

And then I read this article in the New York Times about a new, controversial, experimental (and apparently growing-in-popularity) procedure where people pump an IV full of glutathione into their veins hoping to lighten their skin, and I thought, “Wow, the inability to live in one’s own skin has come to this.”

It was in the 5^TH grade when my father started pumping the rules of “pretend” into my veins. I had just seen Peter Pan, my first Broadway show, and I was smitten. I walk out the theater, arms in a T, flying through the streets of NY, pleading to the gods, announcing to anyone who would listen, especially my father, “That’s what I want, I want to fly around like I’m Peter!”

To which my pops responds, “Papi, that’s gonna be tough, Peter’s played by a white woman.” And before I can wallow in my defeat, he says, “Come on,” and he takes me to Central Park. He gets us two hot dogs and introduces me to a game (a game I still play to this day) called, “Where they going? Where they coming from? Why do they walk that way?”

My pops was convinced that if you watched anything long enough you could begin to become an expert at it, get to know how it lives, how it breathes. He’d say, “Mijo, if you do whatever you have to do, you can become whatever you want. It’s not gonna be easy, but you can. It’s about seeing what people like and becoming that. You want to be rich, hang out with rich people. You want to be smart, hang out with smart people. You want to be funny, hang out with funny people… Fake it till you make it papi. You gotta play the part mijo, play the part…”

“Play the part,” and just like that, all those mornings I spent watching my pops get meticulously ready, fresh shave, cologne, blow-drying his hair for that perfect coif, and putting a sharpie to any stray grays that might pop up on his goatee started to make sense. My pops was metro-sexual before that was even a thing, my pops took longer to get ready then me, my mother, and my sister combined.

“Mijo, you take the life you want and you make the life you want.”

My pops was the superintendent of a 164 unit building in Queens, NY. He knew everyone and everyone knew him, a version of him, the exact version he wanted them to know. I watched him chat, mimic, and play with everybody. One key at a time. The Russians, the Dominicans, the Puerto Ricans, the Jews, his white bosses, his Black brothers and friends, the hood rats, the young kids, the old kids, the senile, the clientele, the doctors.

I noticed early on how many different people my father could become. Sometimes it was a handshake, sometimes it was a head nod, sometimes his voice went low and sometimes it went high. Often it was him laughing at really bad jokes, sometimes it was a wider smile then I ever saw or got. He spoke Russian—“ Do svidaniya, Kak dela?” He spoke street—“Yo, get off my property!” He spoke Spanish— “Oye, Flaco, como estas?” And of course white—“Yes sir, yes mam.”

I thought my pops was the coolest and flyest person I knew. I was 4 foot 10 going into 10th grade. I was not the coolest or flyest. I was not my father or the kids at the park or anyone I wished I could be.

But I still didn’t really understand why my cool as hell, Dominican Samuel L. Jackson (the Pulp Fiction one), mad wisdom, roller skating, DJ-ing Central Park parties kind of cool pops needed to be anything other than what he was. Why he needed to shape-shift and fit into so many different boxes. I would call him out on it, “Pops, why you gotta act so different with everybody?”

Every time, he’d say“Hey, that’s not true, mind your business, leave me alone.”

It was true… Maybe, he didn’t even know. Maybe his IV was so deeply attached to him, he forgot it was there, his many masks and personas becoming one with his blood. Because pretending, over time, becomes disembodiment. You drift. Your body becomes a house you rent instead of a home you own. You become a short distance away from the thing you were born to inhabit.