Free This Is How by Augusten Burroughs

existed.
    After this movie, everybody suddenly worried they might also be a multiple. How else to explain that pair of two-hundred-dollar shoes you almost don’t even remember buying?
    Then, meanly, psychiatrists began saying that there was no such disorder. Or, if there was, it was exceedingly rare.
    Of course, today we are more evolved and less gluttonous with our psychiatric labels. We know fully well that dual personality disorder is indeed a very real thing. After all, anyone who has ever been on a job interview has experienced it for themselves.
    You, the rational and reasonable person who is so excellent under pressure could not possibly be the same person who, during the most important job interview of your life, spent the entire interview counting the ceiling tiles behind your potential boss’s head.
    How absurd to think that was you who momentarily forgot the name of the company at which you were applying for a job.
    It’s as if there are two of you. The you that you are every day, day after day all your life.
    And then the you that you become when you go on a job interview.
    My job interview personality also comes out when I am in a store, shopping. I do not shoplift. However, I absolutely appear to others, especially store security personnel, as somebody who does.
    Even friends have commented on how weird and guilty and sneaky I look from the moment I walk into a Target.
    I am so overly aware of not wanting to be seen as a criminal that I totally come across like one.
    It’s not such a huge deal when this happens at 7-Eleven. It’s pretty huge, though, when you spend the entire job interview trying not to come across like a box of hair and you come across like a box of hair.
    As with so many problems, the solution is sitting right in the center of the problem and if you squint you can see it.
    “. . . trying not to come across like a . . .”
    That’s the problem.
    When you try to do or be something, you can’t do it or be it.
    Because trying is not the same as being. Trying flies in a circle around the moment and being is inside of it.
    You must be.
    You will either do so convincingly and well, or you won’t. But at least you will be plugged in to the moment in the process. Not flitting just outside of it, trying to keep everything together like one of those little heel-snapping Sheltie dogs.
    Many people get this distinction and want to be in the moment, not hovering somewhere above it. The thing is, how?
    By engaging with the person you’re with. Which means, not thinking while they’re speaking and not forming your answer as they are in the middle of asking the question.
    Engaging with the person means following carefully what they say, going for the full ride of their dialogue. So that you don’t skip over a nuance by mistake.
    This is what’ll keep you from zoning out, avoiding eye contact, looking at the wall like a freak, or sweating too much.
    During an interview, candor and transparency matter almost more than sheer ability. Skills can be learned, but if somebody is shifty, there you go. They’re shifty and can’t be trusted, period.
    Most everybody is nervous during a job interview. And for the person conducting the interview, it’s frustrating because you just wish you could meet the person who would be coming to work every day instead of the job-interview-version of this person, on their best job-interview behavior.
    If you had the job, how would you behave?
    If the pressure was off, what would you say?
    To have or not have the job; high pressure, no pressure: these have nothing to do with sitting in a room across from somebody else in that instant. Getting the job or not getting the job is a conclusion; it comes later. It’s outside the moment.
    The truth is: You are only the person you actually are; you may not may not be the person they actually want.
    If you’re sitting there thinking, “God, I must look so stupid compared to the other people she’s interviewing,” you have