On Passing as Typical
Many people learn to perform to avoid confrontations. I’ve been doing it daily for twenty years
I think I was fifteen years old the first time someone told me that I wasn’t what they were expecting.
It came from a girl about the same age who lived fairly close by (at least by the standards of the rural Midwest) but went to a different school. We had been chatting online and getting along quite well, which eventually led to a phone call. This quickly turned awkward It couldn’t have been more than five minutes before she told me that I was different over the phone. She was nice about it, but it was the end of the conversation.
In the years since I’ve heard variants of this quite a few times. Often it’s from people who have certain stereotypes in their heads — of Americans, for example — that I just don’t fit. But I’ve also heard it from people I’ve dealt with personally, even spent time with on a daily basis. In a different context, they seem to feel like they’re dealing with a different person.
But in one sense, they’re right. Without knowing it, I’d been performing for them. They’d only ever really known one of my characters.
I’m in front of an audience on a daily basis, and I have figured out how to…
