First, you’ll want to be adopted by Italian-American parents who raise you to believe that 1. you are perfect 2. you should always act unabashedly like yourself 3. life is always going to be happy. Then, you’ll want those parents to adopt a second child who ruthlessly steals all the attention away from you. You will ask them when you are taking him back to the adoption place. Next, you’ll want to act unabashedly like yourself in front of other children. You can start by swimming in the Ocean City ocean, singing the church hymn “Seek Ye First,” and wondering why all the other children are swimming away from you as if you had just peed in the water. Later, while having a pasta dinner at a family friend’s home, you can ask Hannah McMac to “Pass the gravy.” The entire room will go silent and look at you as if you had just peed on the kitchen chair, and Hannah will drawl with complete disdain, “Graaaaavy??? It’s’ sauce!” and the McMacs will laugh. When you ask your second grade teacher to clarify something about the Bible story of Adam and Eve, she will look at you as if you had peed your pants, and ask how you could really believe that a woman was formed out of a man’s rib. The rest of the class will laugh and act like they knew the story was only a myth. When your 4th grade teacher informs the whole class that there is no Santa, you and Sheena will stand agape until you both sob of embarrassment, and Gavin will excuse himself to the bathroom so that no one sees his giant tears spill out of his eyes. In 6th grade, your favorite teacher will find your best friend’s notebook, in which there are dirty stick-figure drawings, and you will take the blame - and the teacher will cry as if you had just peed on The Bible. And even better, when you get home at the end of that school year, your mom will tell you that, all week, your father has been moving out, and in an hour you are all going to have lunch together and visit his new apartment! Your next phase has begun - the one where you try to become different from yourself. In fact, you will have forgotten what it is like to be yourself. You don’t even remember your parents being married, or any of the vacations you took together, or any of the dinners you had as a family around the table. This memory-wipe will be completed on your 14th birthday, when your dad brings his new girlfriend and her two little girls to your party. The couple will marry a year and half later. Your mom will sell the house in Maple Shade, move down the shore, and you’ll move into the new house with the new happy family, and you’ll manage to be out of that house as much as humanly possible until you go away to college. In college, you will become the least like yourself you’ve ever been. You’ll get some piercings and tattoos, and hang out with people that have no business contributing their input to your life and decisions. Your best friend from high school will actually stop being your friend because she hates who you’ve become. (Of course you will still have a few wonderful friends who love you and try to give you some advice about the no-business group, but you’ll ignore their warnings.) Your brother will join you at college, and he’ll tell you all about how his biological mother found him, and he has a sister who is only a year younger! You’ll wonder what that makes YOU. You’ll also wonder why your own biological mother never bothered to look for you. You’ll also wonder why this never bothered you before. You’ll graduate with honors from college, then work in a doctor’s office making 8 bucks an hour putting up with irate patients and trying to smile when everyone around you is yelling. When you have your first panic attack behind the counter and nearly pee yourself in the process, you’ll question who the heck you are and how you got here. You’ll date your uncle’s girlfriend’s brother. You’ll actually move in with him and live together for 4 years. You’ll try to be yourself, and he’ll say, “My friends love you...” but he’ll say it suspiciously, like an accusation. “Can’t you stop talking to everyone?” and “Can’t you stop being the center of attention?” he’ll ask. You will stop. You’ll even start seeing a counselor together. He’ll cheat on you anyway, and you will feel as if someone peed down your back. He’ll marry someone else not too long after this. At this point, you are an adult. You own your own place, your own car, your own career. You are five years into your high school teaching job, where you shine and feel Actual Purpose. For the first time since you were very little, you are ENCOURAGED to be as wildly creative, as maniacal and bipolar as possible. The Real You shows up everyday in the classroom. It works for you. The students are happy to be in your class and you love them so ferociously that you cry hysterically as each each senior class graduates. The Other You… is still doing stuff to make sure The Real You is stuck on a demented hamster wheel. The Other You decides that at 28, you should start dating the 22-year-old guy who works at the gym and who has a disturbingly co-dependent relationship with his mother. Everyone thinks this will be a fling, but no. You stay together, sort of, for 4 years. He never spends holidays with your family, and his mother hates you because you are disrupting her hold on him. You break up in dramatic fashion: in a snowstorm, on the night before your birthday, when you think he is coming over to propose but instead shows up with a painting. A little more than a year later, he’ll propose to someone else. You’ll start seeing another therapist to help you figure out why you keep ending up unhappy. She will tell you to “feel your feelings.” You’ll take her advice right away and have a panic attack right in front of her. She will talk you through it, reminding you that you will not die and that it will pass. She’s right. (Meanwhile, your career is taking off and you are doing awesome things and articles are being written about your projects and you have earned a Master’s degree from Rutgers and a Holistic Health Certification from a nutrition school and you are in great shape and eating well most of the time and have strong friendships and you fear that someone at some point will expose you for a fraud and everyone will laugh at you.) Then you will date a complete maniac whose own family even asks you why you are dating him. Because some part of you is hell-bent on proving that you are a fraud, you will stay with this dude for two whole years. The only exciting part of this relationship is that you get to go to Hawaii. By exciting, I mean that on this trip, you will face the obvious: that breaking up with this person needs to happen upon returning home, and that it is the smartest thing you’ll ever do. You will take a new job, teaching middle-schoolers. You will get manipulated and bullied by the two teachers who teach the same subject and grade level. The kids will hate you. Your will boss tell you, after your first observation, that he hired you to be Yourself in the classroom. He is disappointed that you are trying to teach like the bullies teach. You will immediately stop going to team meetings and instead develop your own lessons. The bullies will hate you, but the kids will not, and that’s what matters to you. Meanwhile, you will start to actually define what you want in a husband and will realize (palm smacking forehead) that you gave away all of your 20’s and most of your 30’s to people who display The Completely Opposite Qualities. You will join Match.com and eHarmony and start going out on dates. They will pretty much all stink, but at least you will learn how to tell men, early on, that you are not interested. You will meet Ajay. On the second date you will realize you want all the same things out of life. Out of fear, you will both try to play stupid games to show that you are independent and don’t need each other. Then you will try to break up. Then- you won’t. You will move into his townhouse. Each time you reveal more of The Real You, he celebrates it. Your walls come down, and it will feel glorious - as if you are peeing in your bed and you don’t even care! You will realize that you have become Yourself, the person you have always been but had forgotten about. Your friends and family will tell you the same thing. They will cheer, they will cry, and they will breathe loud sighs of relief. (The people who don’t like this development will be dropped from your life, leaving you much lighter.) Six months later you will be engaged, and five months after that you will be married. You will accept, no matter how strange it sounds, that deep down, in your Italian-Irish-German body, you have always been Mrs. Patel.
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