Dissembler
2003-03-06 � 9:48 a.m.

It's not true that I always know what to say.

Yes, I almost always have something to say, but that's not quite the same thing.

People often mistake confident delivery as either conviction or quick wittedness, but it isn't automatically one of those things. It's simply a way of pitching your voice and the way you shape your sentences — no pauses to indicate indecision, keep it firm and flowing, make good eye contact.

Confidence can be feigned, and often is.

The ability to pretend confidence can be learned, and it's something that I learned sometime during high school. If you speak with me, I will respond, often without much pause to think or consider (you can do that while you're speaking, if you practice at it a bit), which I am told is intimidating.

But it's all a trick, an elaborate ruse. I am not confident, and the sad thing is that a great part of my fragile ego is based upon the idea of seeming capable and confident, of being perceived a certain way.

How incredibly sad is that?

I use a variation of the same trick when I write things down, though I feel like my game is more easily exposed when the words are committed to a more permanent medium. My crutch and my Achilles heel in writing is my verbosity. I tend towards wordiness in order to mask the fact that I may not really know what I'm talking about, or how I feel about something, or even how to really express myself. Dump a cloud of words around something, and people tend to ascribe more meaning than is actually there. I find my words to be vague and my themes nebulous at best.

It's all an act.

I used to think I was good at acting as a craft, but now I know that I don't have the discipline to really succeed at something like that; I was just channeling my small ability to dissemble and that was enough to make it look good when I was younger.

For me, the process of getting older has been one of winnowing, of slowly learning that I do not possess the abilities I had somehow convinced myself that I had during my adolescence. I think that I skipped the part of growing up where you develop those skills and abilities until they are actually functional.

Functionality, on the whole, eludes me.

-t

Currently Aurally Inducing: Jawbox, Desert Sea
Selection of the Lyrical Vocabulary: "Like bones by the desert sea, bleached until no one can read their history."

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