Hello, it’s me. The real me. That’s right, after all these years, I have finally decided to reveal who I really am — pop superstar Adele. For the last eight years, I have been living a lie, deceiving the public with my idiotic “Michael Shtrom” character, but now, I am finally ready to come clean. The time has come to tell the real story.

In 2015, I was just finishing up a tiny little tour, and my last stop was at Shoreline Amphitheatre, which I barely managed to sell out. As I was touring the Bay Area, and San Jose in particular, I realized that I just wanted to get away from stardom and the celebrity life, as it was weighing on my mental health. So, when I heard that some loser named Michael Shtrom was applying to a school called Pinewood, I swiftly nicked his application, threw it in the trash, dyed a clown wig black, and came to Pinewood as a third grader. That’s right, no Michael Shtrom has ever been at Pinewood; it has just been my superior acting skills the whole time.

So why am I finally bringing this up now? There are a couple of reasons. First, this Michael persona I have invented will be graduating soon, so I will need to abandon this character and look for a new one from the seventh grade. As such, I will be holding auditions for sixth graders whose likeness I can assume next year to keep my elaborate ruse running. More information on that will come shortly.

Second, try as I might, I have perhaps not been the perfect actress lately. While my “Michael” character is famously nonchalant and blasé about Adele, I have let some things slip here and there, and I have come too close to revealing my true identity. Perhaps it would have been wiser not to carry around a keychain with my name or constantly yap about attending my own concert if I did not want to be discovered, but can you really blame me for having a bit of an ego? I am so great and so amazing that I feel I deserve to hype myself up every now and then, but only a reasonable amount.

So that is my confession: I am not “Michael”; I am just Adele, who got a little carried away with her own ego. Now that I am truly known by the world, I can return to my rightful place as supreme pop star of the galaxy, with no ego behind that proclamation, of course.