I used to know a woman who came to our country. In her country, she was nothing because she was a woman. She knew this and this made her insane. Who wouldn’t be?
In coming to the new country she decided she would re-invent herself, which she promptly did. She dreamed of what she wanted to be and she would become this. She invented a new history, an education and career that she would have had, had she been born in a country that gave dignity to women.
First she imagined her resume. Because in the country where she now made her home, everybody had a resume – even women. You are, she thought, what your resume revealed. “I think, therefore I am,” some famous French philosopher had once declared. Of course, she had never read the works of the French philosopher and had never heard of these words. But she thought and therefore she believed that she was.
Her new resume revealed an illustrious past consisting of journalism and extensive forays into the world of fashion. Every job she had had in her glorious “past”, led into the next one; when one job ended, another one started. According to her resume, she had never been unemployed. Never spent time searching for new work. People who read her resume gasped with surprise and awe, especially at the luck of someone in a third world nation.
On her new curriculum vitae she stated her education of two Masters degrees, in art and in literature. She had managed, while working at her brilliant career to somehow attain two Masters degrees. People were in awe. But her friends never heard her speak of her days at school, or her thesis, or the books she had read or the art she had studied. The people around her were in awe.
She invented a new history of herself. She became an artist of re-invention. She became a work-in-progress. For a time she felt victory because she thought she had fooled everyone.
She began a blog and told people about her blog. For the longest time, her blog was a collection of stolen articles. She even told people that a writer from CNN would be writing on her blog. This was, in part, true. Articles from CNN began to appear on her blog. And then, one day, she began to write.
The articles on her blog stirred up feelings in the readers of sadness, of patheticness. They were painful stories to read. The articles were a swirl of mish-mashed, convoluted thoughts and incorrect punctuation. It was as if someone abusing a controlled substance had sat down at the computer and began to type whatever came into their heads. There was no hint of the journalist she had once pretended to be.
What gave her the greatest pain was the lies and the untruths she had to tell. Sometimes she forgot her lies and people would think of how the story had changed. She sometimes sensed that particular people could see through her and this ate her inside. Her stomach would twist in knots at night, her thoughts, her failures would spin endlessly in her mind. How could she maintain this facade?
She dreamed of glory in her new homeland, but it didn’t come quickly. Like everyone else, in a new country which gives dignity to all people, one must also work at their goals and have something to back them up. Sometimes, dreams and imagination are not enough.
