Wit & Attitude Quote by Jacqueline McKenzie

There’s a particular kind of disbelief that only shows up when you’ve “made it” and it still feels like a clerical error. McKenzie’s description of going to work as “hysterical” isn’t about slapstick; it’s about the absurdity of stepping into a professional life that once lived strictly in imagination. The comedy is defensive. Laughing becomes a way to metabolize the vertigo of sudden legitimacy.

The line “What in hell? Am I here?” captures the whiplash between the body and the résumé: the body walks through the door, but the mind lags behind, still expecting to be escorted out. That’s classic impostor-syndrome terrain, but McKenzie frames it with actorly immediacy: the workplace becomes a set, reality starts reading like a script, and the self is both performer and audience. “I’m going to wake up in a minute” is the language of someone whose success feels provisional, like a dream you can’t hold onto once you stare at it too hard.

Context matters: acting work often arrives in bursts, conditional on auditions, taste, timing, and luck. That instability makes the “job” feel uncanny even when it’s real. Her phrasing also hints at a cultural moment where women in the industry have had to treat achievement as temporary, always one bad meeting away from being rewritten out of the story. The quote works because it refuses the polished gratitude narrative; instead it gives us the messy psychology of arrival, where joy, fear, and disbelief share the same dressing room.