I wake up early every weekday morning and eat a wholesome cooked breakfast with fresh coffee. I go to work. I work in brand management and come up with creative marketing strategies all day. I sell my ideas to entire teams of people. Our work has just been profiled in Marketing Magazine. I take coffee breaks with colleagues during which I talk about important things. I am having an office romance with a man who I am insanely attracted to. Later, we marry. In the evenings I have dinners and cocktails with my girlfriends in unpretentious lounge bars. On weekends I buy classic designer clothes and classic, comfortable shoes that aren't always black. Sometimes patterned ones that will only go with one outfit. Or patterned ones that will be that bit of colour to dress up an all-black outfit, much like a bright necklace, a look I've always liked. The look of a black-wearing designer. I'm a freelance designer of something. Fashion? No. Maybe innovative fridges or toasters. I am the first person ever to come up with the idea of putting that switch there instead. Or earrings. Freelance, and I spend the rest of my time and my earnings on venturing into the forbidden zones of Tibet, just like a man I met in Lhasa. He would get arrested by the cops and then let go because they couldn't read the English in his passport. I can read and discuss in detail ancient Tibetan scripts. I stay in a hostel dorm room because I'm wise to save for the future. I'm passionate about Tibet and not because it's cool to be so.

I'm a magazine columnist who writes weekly and spends the rest of the week thinking of something to write while doing other things like appreciating art in museums around London or doing something zany like pole-dancing or zumba classes, which I can later reflect upon in my column. I'm a magazine columnist who can write something witty that for some reason will have a readership. After emailing a travel journalist to ask for advice, I do as he did and send in articles cold into a regional newspaper until I get published and then move up in to the big league. I am Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love who writes articles about resorts in the Caribbean, lives in an apartment in New York filled with new furniture and oven-proof silicon kitchen utensils bought in funky gift-shops and goes to parties filled with successful people. And fit right in.

I work part-time in a bar in Paris while pumping out painting after painting. I have no ambition to become a famous artist, I am just someone who paints. I have no desire to be successful and am content to remain poor and bohemian. My studio apartment is a mess with clothes on the floor, bottles of paints, and ideas scribbled in notebooks, but I my bohemian friends visit every night, bringing with them wine and cigarettes and contributing to the mess. We collaborate. A lover stays every other night and we eat a cooked breakfast slowly, sip our black coffee and he loves my company as much as I love his. I have a man that is in love with me.

I am a photographer for a cruise company. My latest assignment is to take brochure photos of beaches, tropical, and passengers on their trip of a lifetime. I have the skill and the confidence to land the job, yet I was never overly ambitious for the job in the first place. I didn't need to be. I'm blase, and when I return to Australia, my family picks me up at the airport in a limousine.

I am completing a PhD. In something. I am passionate about only one thing, and can write coherently about it, in large volumes of writing. I spend 3 hours a day as a routine in the library working diligently on my thesis, and then see people I know outside where the coffee stand is and sit at a round green outdoor table with an umbrella. Sometimes a Christian Youth Club member approaches me to tell me I should let Jesus into my life. My supervisor provides all the encouragement I need. Later I become an admired teacher in the department and go on regular trips around the world on research expeditions.

I marry my Muslim boyfriend and he is not jealous. We do not divorce, we continue to be best friends and lovers ongoing. Our children, a girl and a boy, go to private schools in London and then flourish at Oxford, studying history or music or law. Every year we arrive in Sydney early to take them to Carols in the Domain, like he promised, and they wake up to presents and Christmas spirit in the air on the 25th. Our daughter is a modern London Muslim and the world has replaced Islam with a new public enemy. I am a pro-active housewife who takes her kids to extra-curricular activities, buys them musical instruments and science projects is always busy but in a good way, full of energy and ideas. And my husband is the same and the two of us work together seamlessly as a team.

My name is Liz, and none of this is true.  ¶ 21:53 0 Comments