The Invention of the Alter Ego

This piece emerged from my desire to understand why I need to invent personas just to speak. Performance is a daily ritual—done out of necessity—but it’s the ritual itself that revealed how deeply performance is embedded in our culture. To be the broken mirror is to reflect the distortion, not the truth. Or something like that.  

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The Invention of the Alter Ego

I. RETIRING JONAH’S COWBOY BOOTS

In the time of the sensitive, it is especially hard to be a satirist. My entire life has been a piece of performance art that has gone unnoticed.
When you are born into a prison sentence and surrounded by some of the world’s dumbest criminals, a sharp tongue and quick wit become your only way out. In neighborhoods strained by poverty, there’s just as much verbal jousting as physical.
Satire is wasted on the sincere. When forced into isolation at a young age, you develop inside jokes with yourself.
For most of my life, I’ve been a non-traditional performer. The first time I performed in public was dancing for the cost of my breakfast in a diner in West Virginia, while my mother searched for her father—a man with a notorious history of being an aggressive knife fighter. A truly dangerous man. (Unlike his progeny.)
Sporting oversized cowboy boots that swallowed my kneecaps like the whale swallowed Jonah, a thin, sickly-looking pale boy danced to an empty room. The older waitress was the only witness to the spectacle.
The breakfast came free.

II. THE COOL TABLE

In the eighth grade, I wrote and performed a play—including a rap—for my school, with several classmates. That same year, for a history project, Luke, a friend of mine, and I did a Mystery Science Theater-style commentary on the movie Glory for class.
In the early 2000s, friends and acquaintances would text me, “don’t answer your phone.” My voicemail had taken on a legend of its own. I began to pretend I lived inside it, eventually installing a full fishtank.
It was during those years that I began working on my catchphrases. At one point, I bought a wildly loud jacket that looked like a piece of Fruit Stripe bubble gum. The first time someone asked where I got it, I replied:
“Don’t worry about it. This is hot in Japan.”
Hot in Japan became the standardized answer to any question about fashion or personal taste.
My friends looked forward to lunch, where I’d buy a yellow-flavored Laffy Taffy and perform the jokes like a comedian doing their first HBO special.
I didn’t think of it as performance. I thought of it as survival. If I could get them laughing, I could keep them from asking the harder questions—about what I believed, or what I feared, or what I didn’t have. Every skit was a distraction. Every punchline was a pivot.
Around this same time, my older sister would break out the VHS recorder and have me perform an hour-long skit show—completely improvised—just for her. Her favorite bit was me pretending to be Steve Irwin, marveling at the astonishments of the ghetto and poverty alike.

III. MANIFESTO OF A BEARDED LADY

My freshman year of college, a teaching assistant tried to get me to do stand-up because I had a prewritten bit I’d perform at the start of every class—about running away to become the bearded lady in the circus.
When people ask me what privilege is, I can distill it into a simple truth:
Privilege is the freedom to be your authentic self.
If you always get to love what you love, be who you want to be, and do what you want to do—
you are privileged.
And I fought my whole life to be privileged. I won’t let you take it away from me.

IV. THE SPECTACLE OF REALITY

Listen:
My writing mentor is a survivor of the Vietnam War. Even within my scope of depravity and violence, I can’t fathom the terror those soldiers felt—stumbling through foreign jungles, millions of miles from anyone who would recognize their smile.
To me, one soldier killing another is like casting a pebble into the ocean. Small ripples. Easily missed. But the surface is disturbed nonetheless.
People enjoy the performance of reality.
In 1999, during my eighth grade at Urban Community School, I debated whether violent video games made people more violent. Violence has always been a constant in my life—from inside my own home to the streets of Cleveland, Ohio.
At 12, my gut reaction was: Of course they make us violent.
But after researching and reflecting, I realized the failure was in the question itself.
If a society willingly produces, markets, and encourages violence for children, the problem is not the video game. It’s the society that shapes it.

V. REALITY

The United States’ last major act of force on a global scale came after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
At the time, some of my closest friends were Middle Eastern. The anti-brown rhetoric and casual violence were constant. Hatred always speaks louder than love in the public forum, where intelligence is mocked and grievance is monetized.
And now? The fallout continues.
Russia invades Ukraine.
Where have I heard this story before?
Israel bombs Iran and Syria while carrying out an ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The cycles repeat—only faster now. More efficient. More optimized.
Our society feels like a janky bungee-jumping business—run by some guy named Earl, who clearly wouldn't pass the health inspection himself. He insists nothing ever goes wrong.
But if it does, the good news is: you die.

VI. MY REALITY

I don’t leave my apartment much anymore.
It’s not just that I’ve grown tired of performing.
It’s that I see a society exhausted by its own masks.
Across the political spectrum, extremists demand the freedom to be “authentic.” Everyone is a brand now. Even the unfunny ones. Especially the cowards. Everyone wants to monetize their mask. Joe Rogan rants about a fake news story of a litter box in an elementary school—because someone identifies as a cat.
The left, in response, mocks a closeted gay Republican senator—who faces no consequences beyond cultural alienation.
Rogan demands the right to laugh, even at what isn’t true.
Liberals say sexual orientation doesn’t matter—unless they can dunk on you for it.
All the people with power are telling you the other people with power are to blame.
It’s one big performance— meant to keep you tuned in. Meant to make you watch the ads.

VII. EVEN JORDAN UNRETIRED

I decided to start leaving my apartment more.

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Mathew Serback’s work has recently appeared in Orange Peel, Under Review, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. He writes like a punchline that hits late, if at all. He lives in Cleveland, publishes a monthly zine, and sometimes wishes he were someone else.

cover photo by icon ade