Have you ever tried out a persona that wasn’t exactly you, but that you thought would make you a cooler you? And then it turned out that the persona was not as cool as you thought it would be. But you were trapped in it. And you couldn’t shed it. but you refused to cave in and accept that this persona that wasn’t exactly you had become you or you had became it. But maybe it wasn’t. you. Maybe this you was just a set of habits. a closed set of patterns. predictable patterns. that’s all it was.

But the nice thing about habits is that with a little behavioral modification, any habit can be broken.

But where does one begin? the persona originated from somewhere. but where did the other one go? The one before it.

that’s the real question.

Perhaps I should be more specific. That’s one of my bad habits. Vagueness. Lack of specificity because I’m not very good at describing abstraction. I mean, I can do abstract. But describing what I mean is another story.

It was a cold night in February sometime late in the 20th century. I was performing in a show at the local performance art cabaret. Standing in the back of the space. Even further back than the bar, right in front of the cigarette machine. I think that is what they called them back then. You know, vending machines for cigarettes. Everybody smoked except me.

I think it was a Tuesday. Even though I knew most of the audience and the participating artists and many of them were considered to be friends at that time … maybe I didn’t feel cool enough to be there. You know, as the only non-smoker. It may have been around 10:20pm. That was the moment I decided to adopt that other persona. The only way to counter feeling like an outsider amongst outsiders was to be more of an outsider than they were.

Which was not the best idea because that’s when the door closed. And I couldn’t get back inside. And it was freezing out there. Outside. And it was even more freezing because I was outside of being outside. I was in a place where no one could find me. Even though they were inches away. They didn’t realize I had abandoned the persona who was standing in front of the cigarette machine, and not smoking.

That may have been the problem. You see nobody noticed this new persona. That is, nobody even noticed there was a new persona. The only one who noticed was the old persona. I guess people just assumed that the old persona and the new one were one and the same. But they couldn’t have been more different.

It was not too long after that the old persona began to resent the new persona. It was like the new persona had stolen the old persona’s identity. Nobody could have conceived of such a thing as identity theft back then. But that’s what it was. A primordial form of identity theft.