So there’s this 21 year old university girl, and she’s everything you want to be. She never hits the snooze alarm in the morning, even if she had a late night and it’s an early Monday morning and she knows she has classes from 9 to 9. Her clothes, backpack, and lunch are already prepared: her clothes are five years old, tops, and don’t have rips and tears because this girl is not a klutz, and no, she doesn’t have to dance into her jeans in the morning; her backpack is light, carrying only the essentials she needs; and her lunch is comprised of a wrap, salad, breadsticks, some hummus, and some soup that will get her throughout the day without buying anything expensive from campus. She looks in the mirror before leaving the house: her hair is styled and not sticking up in all the wrong places, there are no bags under her eyes, and she certainly doesn’t have stretch marks on her thighs.

She is awake and motivated as she sits on the bus on the way to school. She doesn’t let little things like, the fact that that one guy with the duffel bag is taking three seats up on a crowded bus by spreading his legs, or that one girl refused to take the stairs to the back of the bus to let more people on, annoy her. She doesn’t get a headache and feel claustrophobic and anxious as the bus begins to get packed tighter and tighter on this cold, winter day. The cold doesn’t even bother her: she is fully prepared for the weather and never tries to play stubborn with Mother Nature, even if she hates anything around her neck.

In her early morning class, she listens attentively to her Prof drone on while not going on the internet, working on other class assignments, or playing solitaire. That’s what class breaks are for, or after class. She does not feel herself drifting off, no matter how monotonous or melodious her Prof’s voice is.

After her first class, she drinks the soup and some of the breadsticks and hummus—she knows how to pace herself—as she works on something due two weeks from now. She is happy that she is all caught up on her readings and isn’t leaving it to the last minute. She is not distracted by the various social networking sites she keeps up to date with or feels the need to update the blog she regularly posts with the reviews and comments of the world at large. She doesn’t even work on any of her personal writings: she has specifically scheduled a time for that that she always meets and right now, school comes first.

She meets up with a friend from her second class about a half hour before the class begins and she is able to give him her full attention and understands all his highly intellectual jokes. She recommends an obscure, post-modern novel for him to read because she has a diverse vocabulary when it comes to books. She’s read all the classics, name any, be they from the western canon, internationally acclaimed, or from her favourite genre, fantasy. This girl isn’t one to stop something in the middle and abandon it.

In her second class of the day, she commits herself fully to the class; she raises her hand and does not feel like she should ever put it down because someone else should have a turn, and she is not worried about messing up in front of the class. She is able to speak passionately and eloquently on the spot in such a way that her colleagues agree with her. She doesn’t, in the irony of all ironies, have trouble with words: she’s a writer, for heaven’s sake. Her tongue doesn’t trip over pronunciations and she never says things in a way she doesn’t intend. She is not the type of person to get called “argumentative” because her opinions and views are respected and understood.

With all her work done, she hangs out with a few of her friends from one of her creative writing classes with whom she has grown quite close over the semester. She doesn’t feel harried or demotivated to hang out with anyone. People ask her for her advice and opinion and they want to genuinely hear it, and this girl is not one to fade into the background in a large group of people. Her voice is clear and appropriately loud when putting her two cents in amongst a group of intelligent, animated speakers. She buys a drink from the bar without guilt or shame because she is very good at managing her money.

Even though she’s now in her last class of the night, this girl does not lose her focus or stray from the task at hand, even though the prof teaches right to the last minute of the class when most professors would let their late night students go home earlier. She gets home by 9:30 and puts everything in its place and prepares an outfit and a lunch for the next day.

She lives with her 18 year old little sister, who, before this school year, has never lived on her own. This girl does not get exceedingly angry in an overblown sort of way that the sink is full of dirty dishes or that greasy pizza boxes were left in the living room for multiple days, even though the garbage is less than ten steps away. She deals with it herself with no complaint, and plans to have yet another level headed talk to her sister about responsibility in such a way that does not alienate her sister from her tomorrow.       

She doesn’t feel the need to spend the night at her boyfriend’s house: they have spent the weekend together. She doesn’t feel self-consciousness or anxious that any time spent away with him might result in him leaving her. In fact, she is so comfortable with her sexuality that she leaves him wanting more, even though she isn’t as experienced as he is. He texts her how her day has been, and she responds promptly. She will give him the night to himself.  

By this time it is 10 PM and even though it’s freezing outside, this girl gets ready to go on a run. This is something she always does, regardless of the weather, every day for a minimum of 5 km. After running her minimum length, however, this girl decided to push herself. She even sprints the last block, even though she’s run 10 km. Panting, but not sweating, she makes it up the stairs to her downtown apartment, drinks some water, stretches, talks a little with her sister, and makes for the shower, which she takes at a reasonable temperature for a reasonable amount of time, and gets into her pajamas.

At 10:30 she now has her appointment with the artist in her. She always makes this appointment and writes easily for an hour before going to bed. She has never fully understood the concept of “writer’s block”, because if you have a passion for doing something, how could you ever block yourself from doing it? This girl makes herself a pot of jasmine tea. It’s nearly 11 when this girl hears a soft thump from outside her bedroom which fills that girl with an impending sense of dread. She knows she has to go pick it up

but…

venturing out into the dark living room isn’t her cup of tea. She sighs and gets up from her desk and opens her bedroom door into darkness. Directly across the living room, there is a heavy blanket laying crumpled on the floor, and above it…is an ornate frame with a painting inside of it. This girl has never been quite sure where this painting has come from or when exactly it came to decorate her living room, but here it is, all the same. In the dark, this girl can only make out the blurry outline of the painted portrait within the frame. She turns on the light and has a set of eyes staring back at her.

These eyes have bags under them. Honestly, each individual part of the face in the painting could be considered attractive, but not the configuration displayed here. The look of that face is one that makes even the lightest of acquaintances worry about this painted girl. The girl approaches the portrait and remarks how the girl facing her is so, so different from her, but so, so the same. The painted girl’s appearance reeks of non-motivation and extremes, the opposite of this girl. The girl in the painting looks like she has to hit the snooze button twice before getting out of bed, and the harried way her hair has been combed cements that notion. Her clothes don’t suit her and there’s a permanent sense of anxiety on her face, as if, the moment this girl stops talking, the animation drains from her very soul. The painted girl looks as if she has the potential for brilliant ideas, but not the time or ambition to carry them off. She looks as if she wants to reach her hand out of the portrait, but either ego or a sense that she’ll be burdening others stops her. The painted girl looks as if she is never fully awake and has Disney Princess levels of wanting more out of life.

But…

That girl in the painting, maybe she has super simple pleasures that make her giddy with happiness that seem ridiculous to the eyes scrutinizing her. The painted girl is the type that will sing at the top of her lungs in the shower, and loves to lather herself with an obscene amount of soup bubbles so she can turn herself into a giant bubble wand. When the painted girl steps out of the shower, at almost 3 in the morning, not around 10 PM, after doing nothing but staring at a screen for hours and conjecturing about her life—for better or worse—at large. The painted girl doesn’t get out much, but when she does, she dances without a shred of dignity or sense of shame completely sober. She’ll only feel embarrassed about it when someone brings up she’s horribly off rhythm the morning after, regardless of thirteen years of classical piano training under her belt.

Yeah, that girl in the painting has packed on some weight since entering university, but maybe that poundage is like an armor that she’s working at shredding away, even if she might like sleep and Reese peanut butter cups a little too much. Sure she is unmotivated 75% of the time, but that other 25%? This girl could probably write an entire novel in a month, and she knows it, which is why she is so hard on herself.The painted girl knows that she is not perfect. Heck, she has days where she looks in the mirror and sees nothing but a blobby glob of ugly, fat, and “so done” with life,

but…    

She looks at the painting on the wall of that girl with the perfectly coiffed hair and fierce determination on her face, and though most days she thinks that it’s that girl who gets called Amazon Brittany with the militant, raw writing voice,

but…

Brittany knows that, even before photoshop, artists probably didn’t always paint their exact portrait. Maybe they painted over a bald spot or added makeup when they themselves didn’t wear any. She knows that writers are probably just as narcissistic as painters, if not more so. Brittany knows for a fact that she has written herself into her stories before: idealized versions, versions worse than herself, and some in between, over and over and over.

But…

maybe Brittany doesn’t have her boyfriend wrapped around her finger so much as she depends on him for emotional support in a world where she thinks nobody cares (there are days when she feels maybe even the boyfriend doesn’t care).

But…

staring at the idealized Brittany, Brittany knows that that other Brittany has probably never took pole dancing lessons and brags about it incessantly and actually uses those moves in clubs, not caring about the men that leer and the women that judge. She knows other Brittany probably would have quit trying to do Live Action Role Playing a long time ago. She knows that other Brittany probably doesn’t use puns blended with pick-up lines for almost every occasion and situation as her primary flirting technique, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t pan out most of the time because she made him laugh.

With her planning, and ahead-of-time preparation, ambition, and overall perfectness, Brittany knows that other Brittany couldn’t possibly exist and if she did couldn’t possibly be human. Maybe a fem-bot, but not human. That fem-bot is probably no fun to write about anyways with her lack of flaws, to the point it comes out mechanical rather than artful. Maybe, just maybe, Brittany has an epiphany from time to time and realizes that she’s human.