Persona
A single individual can carry multiple personas within themselves. I am no different. My conversations, my laughter, and my existence take shifts depending on the people I am around. When I am alone, all those personas start to blissfully submerge, converge, and diverge at the same time, often confusing me, forcing me to ask myself: what am I, who am I, what I want, what I need, and what I dream of.
During conversations, I am often opinionated. There's black and white, there's right and wrong, there's yes and no. Desolation, however, brings me to a void where my eyes, my heart, and my mind can not recognize the lines in between. There's no black and white anymore, everything is a swirl of different shades of gray, one lighter or darker than the other.
Wrong and right.
Yes or no.
I become indecisive and question myself if I really have to pick a side.
Making decisions is harder these days. Day after day, I am experiencing new whirlwinds of misery, joy, satisfaction, regret, bliss, calm, chaos, and a hundred other inexplicable emotions.
Is this what it feels like to be an adult?
For most of my life, I have lived as someone's daughter, someone's sister, and someone's friend. The tangled relations didn't end there. I was someone's relative, I was a girl who lived near someone's abode, I was a girl who studied in the same class as someone's child, and I was a human who breathed the same air as someone else. Thus, life had never been short of eagle eyes, calculating minds, pointed fingertips, muffled sarcasm, and predatory intentions.
I thought I could not get more prepared, more strong, more level-headed, more compassionate, more empathetic, more what others want me to be. But, somehow, the burden I feel on my soldiers is getting heavier, the intensity of others' eyes on me is more piercing, and the fear of slipping up and falling into a labyrinth of my own mistakes is more pronounced.
I am on a quest: an attempt to find myself, my aspirations, and my conscience.
Who am I?
Who do I want to be?
The answers are definitive yet variable at the same time. After all, there's neither a lower nor a higher limit on how much I can shape myself as someone you want me to be. I have been living off your ideals, your ideas, your expectations, and your aspirations for a long time. You are the artist, the writer, the creator of my personas. Only you can decide: what I should become, what I can become, and what I will become.
Now and then, though futile my attempts, I'll revolt against your ideas, your expectations, and your perception of me. I'll try to paint a persona that represents me: flesh and blood, mind and soul, on and within.
