[et_pb_section admin_label="section"][et_pb_row admin_label="row"][et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_image admin_label="Blog Image" show_in_lightbox="off" url_new_window="off" use_overlay="off" animation="left" sticky="on" align="left" force_fullwidth="off" always_center_on_mobile="on" use_border_color="off" border_color="#ffffff" border_style="solid" src="https://gotgreenseattle.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Climate-Justice-Program-Team-at-Got-Green.jpg"][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label="Image Caption Text" background_layout="light" text_orientation="right" use_border_color="off" border_color="#ffffff" border_style="solid" custom_css_main_element="font-size:8px;" text_font_size="10"]This is a test, because it is a test.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row admin_label="row"][et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Blog Text" background_layout="light" text_orientation="left" use_border_color="off" border_color="#ffffff" border_style="solid"]Earlier this year, in the deep boredom of late winter, I started keeping a Google doc called “Who Played Themselves 2016.” It was both a private joke and a serious inquiry. There was something about the year’s conditions—the weather on social media, a certain psychological wind—that seemed to put us, as humans, in increasing danger of playing ourselves. I felt a rude but genuine certainty that recording major incidents of this nature would work as a type of personal prophylaxis. I would teach myself how not to play myself; I could feel private satisfaction about other people’s hubris while I learned from their mistakes.Of course, in doing this, I played myself completely.The act of playing yourself can be loosely defined as working against your conscious intentions. It’s what you do when you think you’re serving your own interests but are actually betraying them—often through significant effort, often in a spectacularly public way. In 1990, Ice-T released a song called “You Played Yourself,” in which each verse is devoted to a cautionary tale of the phenomenon. A rapper boasts about his money to make himself seem richer, and then his fans see through it and abandon him, leaving him broke. A man thinks that he can buy his date’s affections; she empties his pockets and disconnects her phone. In the two-line chorus, over a James Brown sample, Ice-T spits, contemptuously, “You played yourself / Yo, yo, you played yourself.” In a 1999 episode of “This American Life,” a man named John Bowe described a youthful attempt to hitchhike across the Sahara Desert—a journey that, as one might expect, grew increasingly dire. “You just catch this little click that the universe makes,” he said. “There are no words you could use to describe what that feeling is like, of, Oh, I’m so naïve, oh, the world is so cruel, oh, my God, this is what you wanted, and this is what you got.”Bowe then found the words: “It’s just that feeling of you played yourself,” he said.A striking 2016 example comes from a man in Vancouver, who, in dealing with the stress of his wife’s apparent infertility, developed a wandering eye. In order to indulge it, he asked his wife for an open marriage; she subsequently got pregnant by someone else. In June, he wrote a personal essay about this journey on the Huffington Post, and then, after facing ridicule, he requested that the editors delete it. (This story illustrates a crucial axiom of playing yourself in the age of the Internet: the act tends to beget more examples of the same.)[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]