A Vonnegut Halloween

Seeing all the Halloween costumes in my facebook feed made me think of this Kurt Vonnegut quote – “We are who we pretend to be.” Now I’m sure my English 101 teacher would object to trivializing this quote when Vonnegut used it to tackle extreme questions about morality and war, but that same teacher is probably in the slammer anyway since he thought he had no legal obligation to pay his income taxes. So it goes.

What this quote means to me is that your life is what you decide to make of it. Sure, some people are naturally more athletic, or have higher metabolism or come from a wealthy family, etc. But that doesn’t change your situation. Every day you can wake up and make a choice about who you want to be and what you want to do. Even if you are 400lbs if you decide, today, to start pretending to be somebody that makes healthy choices you will ultimately become that person.

The opposite is surely true as well; you can fancy yourself some kind of athlete but if you’ve spent the last 10 years pretending to be a sedentary coach potato then you will surely wake up one day and realize that’s what you’ve become. I know because I was that person and it didn’t even take 10 years to get there. The good news is that it doesn’t take 10 years to get back to where you want either.

It’s Halloween so why not pretend to be something great, something better than you currently are?