I reject your reality and substitute my own
It's nice to be other people for a change.
When I was a kid, I used to change my accent to something else. A random accent, something I'd picked up from movies or television, or from people walking down the street. I would practice it for a little while, alone in my room. Get used to the way the words felt on my tongue, the way my teeth clicked when I said things a certain way. Really try to nail the inflections, the pauses, the consonant and vowel sounds. Then I would go out to the store, or to a restaurant, and use that accent for an entire day. Just on strangers, never my family or friends. (Because, well, that might seem silly.)
Sometimes I think people bought it, other times they ignored me. But when I got really good at it, and people really seemed to fall for it, it was exciting. I almost felt like a different person. Sometimes I even had answers ready for where I was born or how long I'd been in town if asked. I rarely had to use them, but it never hurt to be prepared. And, yeah, sometimes I did it on into my teens and 20s. When I was waiting tables or tending to a cash register, and faced with a stranger I'd never see again. Just to see if I could do it, just to see if I could trick somebody. And sometimes it still worked.
I must make it sound like I was unhappy with myself if I was going to go through all the trouble of pretending to be somebody else. I wasn't particularly happy or unhappy, not really. Not any more or less happy than the average person was with themselves. It's kind of hard sometimes to objectively gauge the bodies we're stuck in, the voices that come out of our mouths, the thoughts that race around our brains. What seems like an amazing feat of genetic engineering and evolution to one person seems like a mole or a freckle or an upwards inflection to another. It's all a matter of interpretation.
I was trying to figure out just who it was that was crammed into this body, to whom all of these racing thoughts belonged. I was learning to be a story-teller. It was like a game to me, or a puzzle to solve, because only I knew who I really was. Everybody else was subject to my facade, my made-up story, the lies I told. The only person we ever really know with any certainty is ourselves, and I liked having everybody at the mercy of my whim. I could be whoever I wanted, if only for an afternoon. So even if only one person out of ten believed my lie, really believed it, I still felt like I'd won.
At the end of the day I'm still Magen, with her boring old story and her boring old accent. (A vague North Texan twang if you listen hard enough, especially when I'm singing.) But if you didn't know that, you would have to believe whatever I wanted you to. And that's what makes the game worth playing.
