It's incredible how you can be different things to different people. You could be the love of one man's life and an embarrassing mistake to another. You could be someone's craziest friend, and to another you might be the slow Wednesday night amigo. To your mother you might be a constant source of stress, and to your father, the reason for being (incredibly light!).
To one man you might be the unattainable- that gorgeous creature for whom he longs, and has for so long. He remembers all of the times he passed you in the hall this week. He thinks of you at night, of the way a piece of your hair is always falling over your eye, strands of it weaving with your long, delicate eyelashes. Some stupid joke you made in the elevator last Wednesday still makes him laugh out loud when he thinks of it in the shower on Saturday. Oh yes, you fantastic, gorgeous thing, if only you knew.
To another you are a passing thought. A distraction on the way to… what? Who cares? You're cute enough and amusing. Nothing serious. Just some chick who will end up a blip in the memory a few years from now. Time acceptably wasted. Conveniently cool with the non-commital gray area so many 20-somethings like to idle in and call it dating. A dot-dash, lingering little on the mind outside of meetings.
To one professor you might be the saving grace of the class. That student who writes thoughtful papers. The one who actually gets it. He saves your paper to grade last, hoping it will end a night of depressing critiques on a high note. You make reasoned points in class discussions. It's clear you've done the reading and synthesized it with the readings that came before. Without your presence the professor might be given to taking sips from his flask before class, moved by his utter loathing of the rest of the students, drones trying not to get called on for lack of preparation.
To another professor you are a nuisance. A brownnosing, simpering sycophant who embodies everything that is artificial and abhorrent. It's clear to him that you have no life since you must spend all of your time strategizing how to outwit your peers, as though class were a competition and not a conversation among intellectuals. He delights in marking up your verbose term papers, accusing you of masking lack of understanding with complicated sentences that serve no purpose other than self-aggrandization.
You can kill yourself trying to reinvent your persona, attempting to project the best possible version of yourself to as wide an audience as possible. But even if you captured the hearts of all Americans, there would still be a billion Brits and Bengalis and Bundesrepublik Deutschlanderins who don't give a rat's ass about you.
So don't sweat it, yo.
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