Please note: I do not actually believe that everything is literally "just an act". When I wrote this, I was thinking about school and how one's reputation is not necessarily what one is actually like. Take me for example: I'm actually a very bubbly, silly, well-hummored person who normally can't shut up for more than two or three minutes max. But at school, I tend to be too shy (even half-way into the year due to the fact that its sorta become my reputation and I'm too lazy to change it) to speak out much and you can usually find me sitting in the back of the class watching everyone else laugh and joke about. (Also, I never sit with anyone during lunch if I can help it. I'm just not that good at the whole "lunchtime gossip" thing and I can never find anything interesting to say anyway, so it doesn't really matter.) So while I was thinking about reputations and such, I thought: "It's sorta like putting on a play, pretending to be like somebody else because that's whom everybody thinks you're supposed to be. Which, technically, it is in that sort of situation, but you get my point. Anyway, that thought lead to me randomly coming up with the first line of the poem, and everything just sorta fell into place after that.