I'm sorry that sometimes I'm mean..

I’ve wanted to be an actress for a while now. I’ve wanted to be on Broadway and on the big screen. I’ve wanted to have everyone know my name and to be the greatest actress there was. But I can’t do that. I can’t feign something I don’t feel. I can’t be someone else. I can only be me and it took me until now to figured that out.

As a fun little experiment to see if someone’s features would make more people pay attention to them, I created a fake twitter profile. I found a picture of an attractive man with a beard, holding a dog somewhere on tumblr and I set up the profile. I named this man Geoff. For two days, Geoff wrote dumb jokes and interacted with others, mostly females, about friendship, favors and Starbucks. He quickly gained up to 30 followers in less than 48 hours.

This morning, I put Geoff’s picture into google’s picture image search and a lot of tumblr blogs appeared. “Men and their dogs”, “Attractive guys with beards.” Really lame shit like that. But in the plethora of tumblr blogs he seemed to have been featured on, was a flickr account. So, naturally, I investigated.

There were literally hundreds of pictures of our Geoff all over this flickr page, taken by a lovely woman whom I could only assume was his girlfriend or sister or someone who just knew him really well. Geoff’s name isn’t Geoff. Geoff’s name is Clay. Clay’s in a band and Clay is a real person.

Suddenly, I just felt like a creep. Who was I, some black 19 year old girl from St. Louis, to pretend I was this tall, 20-something white guy from God knows where? And as I learned more about Clay, the creepier I felt. His photos weren’t just some toys to be played with by a person he’d never even met before. I couldn’t pretend to be him anymore. So, I deleted Geoff. He couldn’t stay. He wasn’t me or mine to play around with.

I’ve always wanted to be an actress. I’ve never been able to portray anything that wasn’t simply me, though. I’ve always felt uneasy and unreal. I can’t be an actress, I don’t have the emotional capability. I think I’m okay with that, though.

If I was to ever meet Clay, however, I’d have to apologize to him. And tell him his band is pretty great.