Brace yourself, because the following story about someone who has tragically low self-awareness is definitely going to make you cringe: This woman thinks she’s lived a good life despite the fact that she never played an orphan in a production of Annie.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
In all of Kim Protski’s 44 years, she has never once experienced the incredible thrill of donning a costume of raggedy clothes and belting her heart out alongside five to ten other girls portraying a band of spunky orphans in a production of the musical Annie—yet even in middle age, she remains somehow blind to this crushing reality, and even seems to think that she has it good in life. Although Kim is obviously welcome to be grateful for the blessings she does enjoy–a wonderful husband, two beautiful daughters, and a successful career–it would be utterly delusional of her to think that the contented existence she’s built for herself in any way makes up for the unfortunate truth that she’s never known the ecstatic high of singing “Hard Knock Life” while doing over-the-top impressions of mean old Miss Hannigan to a rapturous audience of her family and friends.
God, this is so hard to stomach.
Shockingly, though, Kim is able to sleep soundly through each night, even though it would make perfect sense for her to regularly jolt awake as she realizes with stomach-dropping clarity that there’s no decades-old playbill out there in which her name is listed next to that of a character like Pepper, or Molly, or even just “Orphan.” There are certainly people who have had less good fortune in their lives than Kim has, but things are looking bleaker for her by the day considering the fact that she’s now well past Annie age—and even worse, she doesn’t even seem to understand that this peak life experience has passed her by. Instead, she goes about her days naive to her own suffering, never stopping to consider just how much she missed out on compared to those lucky souls who can look back on cherished memories of cartwheeling joyfully out of the wings at the end of Annie to do a curtain call with the kindly old man who played Daddy Warbucks.
Yikes. It’s so sad to see someone walking through the world with absolutely no perception of how things really are. Here’s hoping Kim comes to terms with the cold, hard facts of her life soon, because this is seriously tough to watch.
