Pretenders

Living a faux life.

pretend

I can’t live a pretend life. Pretend to be happy. Pretend to have a perfect life. Pretentious people set my teeth on edge. We all have skeletons in our closets. Most deny their evil and pretend to be good. You know the type of person I am talking about. They always tell everyone how wonderful their lives are.

pretend

/prɪˈtɛnd/

verb

behave so as to make it appear that something is the case when in fact it is not.

The mom at the school bake sale with beautifully crafted cakes. A cold smile set on her face, while she’s praying to go home where she can sink into the oblivion of the bottle.

The immaculately dressed man, giving a speech about quantum physics, while his drunk wife waits at home for a beating.

I can mention more stances, but I’m sure you understand my meaning. Why do people have to pose every day? Living a made-up life. How far can they take their faux life? You will be amazed at what humans are capable of.

On my previous blogging platform, I met a fellow blogger called Barbara, who suffered from cancer. Or pretended she did. My heart went out to her, and I commented on her posts regularly. Then her fiancé privately contacted me to inform me that she was in hospice. My heart was breaking, and I immediately wrote a post about her life-threatening situation.

I had the whole blogging platform in an uproar, and all my fellow writers sent her messages of comfort and support. They wrote posts filled with love for our peer. Then another blogger who knew her personally told us it was all fictitious. I promptly stopped receiving updates about Barbara’s condition and realised he was right. Soon after that, she deleted her blog.

I felt like an idiot falling for a con. I still don’t know what the main aim was. Some of the bloggers thought I was part of the invented story. Thank goodness we had a MOB (meeting of bloggers) in Cape Town, and they all found out that I was duped.

This proves how people pretend to be something they are not. After this fiasco, I take everything I read with a grain of salt. People can make up any imaginary story, and how do we know it is true? Substack is about a thousand times bigger than the South African platform I blogged on, and we met personally on a regular basis all over the country. This means there is no way we can confirm what anyone writes.

Don’t allow yourself to be blinded by a facade put on to create a faux life. Let the words move you, but don’t give your heart over to someone who may not even exist.

Namaste