Thom 🌈

[blazing atlas]

Please be patient

Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.

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[foggy sphinx]

it's être in the imperfect tense. both penser and être are in the imperfect there. imperfect is a past tense that's generally used for continuous actions/things with no clear particular time that they happened

I sometimes think of the imperfect tense as sort of like the "was doing" tense in English. So "je mangeais" can mean "I was eating" - in contrast to the passé composé "j'ai mangé" which can only really mean "I ate"

But, the imperfect in French is more flexible than the "was doing" form in English, which can be seen in your example where "I have to be the person he was thinking I was being" is super awkward in English.