The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 85 of 254
Good Brooke and bad Brooke
‘My now obviously ex-boyfriend was very keen to represent me as though there was a good me and a bad me. Anything that I did that he liked – you know, I knit – that was good Brooke, and then if I behaved in a way he didn’t like that was bad Brooke, as if there were two of me. It was like, “I know there is this good person. Why can’t you be her all the time?” And I felt really uncomfortable with that, because when you’re around someone a lot it’s hard not to start to take on the way that they see you and what they’ve created as who you are, and you do kind of respond to certain things about that. At the beginning that wasn’t the way I thought about it. It was more like going to work, putting on a suit; going to a party, putting on a dress; talking about x conversations, talking about y conversations. Then as time went on I did start to get the feeling, what if there’s a good Brooke and a bad Brooke, and can I just uncover good Brooke? But then after I got out of that I thought back around it again and just thought if you took all these things that he had identified as this other person, this incredible me that I could be, there…