The perfect pitch
Manila, 28 September—How do you introduce yourself first?
As far as first days of school go, this is perhaps the one thing I feel most pressured to get correctly.
Call it your elevator pitch. In class, we defined it as a 1-2 sentence intro which includes who you work with and in what areas you serve them.
Certainly, this is just one aspect of yourself—your work, area of expertise, career. After all, the elevator pitch is all about prioritizing information. It’s not really a comprehensive statement of who you are; rather it’s a snippet. In this instance, who are you first?
Different occasions call for different elevator pitches. You’d probably pitch yourself differently at a job interview, at a funeral of a distant relative, or at a first date.
Food for thought: Supposing you’re already capable of time travel, how would you pitch present yourself to your younger self—say, 15 years ago? 25 years ago?
Taking Substack’s thread feature for a spin:
I swear this is also related
One of my favorite Buffy episodes is from Season 4 (also known as the gay season). In a two-part episode, Faith returns after waking from her coma—the one that Buffy had put her into after stabbing her during the previous season’s finale.
Context: I love the tension between Buffy and Faith because it’s the classic ‘lawful good vs chaotic good’ kind of tension. Buffy likes playing by the rules; Faith often did not. As a result of many issues that played out in the previous season, Faith ended up killing a man she’d initially mistaken for a demon, etc etc and basically she ended up working for Season 3’s main bad guy. She and Buffy got into a fight toward the finale (it featured handcuffs, just so you know) and Buffy ended up stabbing Faith with her own knife.
ANYWAY. So yeah, the second part of that two-part arc is an episode called “Who Are You?” (See, I told you this is also related) In this episode, Buffy and Faith switch bodies. Sarah Michelle Gellar does a fantastic job of channeling Faith, her language and her mannerisms, while pretending to still be Buffy, whereas Eliza Dushku as Buffy tries to walk a mile in Faith’s shoes (and face) for a change. In the end, it is Buffy’s best friend’s girlfriend Tara who figures it all out, sensing a ‘brokenness’ in Buffy’s aura and eventually finding a (witchy, very lesbian) solution to the problem.
The episode successfully tackles issues of identity and empathy. Sometimes, when we find out what makes us who we are, it provides us an insight of what makes others who they are, too.
Who are you when you’re with other people? Who are you online? Offline? On different social media platforms?
Who are you when no one is looking?
Related readings
The Most Dangerous Way to Lose Yourself via The Atlantic
What self-awareness really is and how to cultivate it via HBR
This video sums this post up nicely via Tiktok/YouTube
Have a great week ahead,
K.