There is an advice that I hold close to my heart, which is – “the path of a great performer is to know thyself.”
I am terrible at knowing myself. I make many mistakes when it comes my own life. I say what I don’t mean, and I am just bad with communicating with humans. After all, I only had books as my friends and I grew up almost like a mute. I had no one to talk to as an only child. My maid accompanied me everywhere but she hardly spoke to me. She told me to keep quiet and not ask too much questions. I could only find answers in books.
Teachers could not answer my questions. My classmates thought I was weird. In between my textbooks I would scribble poetry and stories I had invented. I spent hours in the library, consoled my sadness in the joy of reading. I could get lost in faraway worlds and places that I would never have the opportunity to go to.
In high school, my essays were passed around and read out aloud by teachers. They loved my writings. So much so they got them duplicated to be read by the teachers in the humanities department. When I dropped out of completing arts college, I buried in my old identity and renamed myself to prevent anyone from recognizing who I was. For years I kept this blog and did not wish for people to find it. I continued to write, publish and submit my essays for circulation under different pen names. I went by different names in social settings till I lost who I was. I took the most unordothox route to study business and abandoned my education in humanities to seek a different path of redemption. Maybe I am not a writer, I a business person. Maybe I am not a starving artist, but an independent artist. These conflicts plagued my soul and I was further and further away from who I was.
Still I did not know myself, and I am so afraid to say it but actually I hardly have a clue who am I. I had tried all sorts of ways to try to find out my family ancestry, travel, spend time with my grandparents. But this is something I could not get. To me, I am a shadow of myself. There is a blankness when I try to dig out who I really am. My visions turns blank and my voice is silent. In my dreams there is a shadow self that tries to kill me every night and it ends in bloodshed. Sometimes I am drowning in a deep sea with a rock tied on my ankle. Sometimes I am in a dark alley way and attacked by multiple shadows.
On sweet blissful nights I am on the beach with my lover under the stars. The waves are crashing on our feet. We are rolling in the sand, our tongues entwined. The sea sweeps us in under and we are submerged in the ocean depths. No one knows who we are. No one knows where we were. It was just the two of us in this embrace. The next moment, he is torn away from me by the forces of gravity that sinks him into the abyss. He disappears and I am left alone in this universe. I was not defined by having a lover, and having a lover did not allow me to know who I was. He had to leave me for me to discover I am whole and complete as I am.
Why am I tearing at this point? In my realisation it is true. I am born alone, and I will die alone. I will never be understood no matter how much I wanted to be understood. I will never be who I want to be, time will consume me before I could accomplish my life work. I will never know who I am. I am evolving each day and the person whom I knew I was yesterday is gone today. Like a butterfly that takes flight, I am flying without a clue of what I was in the past.
It struck me today – there is no fixed way of being. Who we are each day changes and grows and evolves as experiences colour and coats our actions and speech. Who am I today is determined by one thing only – a declaration of who I am to the world.
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AVERRAL writes under pen name Scarlet Risqué. She stars in Scarlet Queen YouTube with over a million views. She holds a degree in business. The RED HOURGLASS is ranked Top 50 Espionage Thriller on Amazon. She is currently writing the sequels to the Hourglass Series. Grab a free copy of her novel now RED HOURGLASS on Amazon |
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