Once more on repetition

It's astonishing how much people repeat themselves. Today at AA a woman was telling a story and, as she was telling it, I realized that I had already heard her tell exactly the same story, and when she got to the punchline ("I stood at the top of the stairs and heard that vodka bottle calling my name") I had this feeling that her repetition was more or less verbatim. The theoretically inclined would call this type of repetition the performance of self.

Who am I to talk? Particularly in sales, I find myself repeating myself endlessly. In fact, all businesspeople today are supposed to have "elevator speeches," verbal mini-mes. I know that, at parties, I return to well-rehearsed themes and turns of phrase to overawe males and enrapture ladies. You could almost say that we craft a set of linguistic masks to be used with interlocutors of differing distances from ourselves: strangers, people at the school, neighbors, friends, family, self . Theoretically, when you get to the core there ought to be something authentic.

And that's the problem. It's hard to dissociate yourself from what you do most of the time, so you become your elevator story, because it seems easier that way.