Prompt from V-blog: Is it true that we spend too much of our lives convincing others that we are someone we are not?

Be yourself – eat the potatoes!

To be blunt, yes – we each expend disproportionate amounts of effort and time on attempting to convince others that we are something or someone we are not.  The most obvious example I can think of from The Great Gatsby is the fact that four people are kept from living their lives with the one each truly loves, because three of them are pretending to love someone else – namely, each maintains the façade of loving his or her present spouse.  Myrtle is married to George Wilson, but Myrtle loves Tom (who reciprocates her affections), though Tom is married to Daisy, who is in love with Gatsby, who loves her as well.  As Catherine confides to Nick, speaking of Tom and Myrtle, “Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.” (Fitzgerald 37).  She follows this with a suggestion heaping with beautiful common sense like delectable potatoes on a Thanksgiving platter, asking “Why go on living with them if they can’t stand them?  If I was them I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.” (Fitzgerald 37).  This really would seem to make the most sense – if two divorces were attained in short order, four people would be much happier: Myrtle, Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby would each be free to marry the person he or she loves (sucks to be George).  Sadly, at least as far into the book as I have read, each involved sustains the pretense of being someone he or she is not.  The lesson would seem to be stated more plainly, in actuality, in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: “Above all else, to thine own self be true.” (I don't recall the page number).

I’ll be true to myself by going to devour some of the aforementioned potatoes now, since I truly love good food J