The authentic self that we feel the tendencies to become and behave as leaves me as I step into the limelight and my body becomes a hollow shell for the influence of others to penetrate and solidify into as if otherworldly and alien-like beings were, in nature, me. 

The strings of personality and characteristics that are threaded and sewn together to form the floundering thing named after me lose form; all within the true nature and beauty of authenticity, they lose forms of solidity, identity, complexity, and personality. I lose control of who I am, where my boundaries lay, my behavior, my surface-level personality, and the thoughts that make me, me. I end up catering to the likes of others, my shell being diseased and riddled with the fumes of others as their presence and existence shine brighter than my heart ever had and ever could. 

It’s a feeling of no true feelings. I become no one, I lose all sight of the unique traits that were once etched into my being, cementing my place in the world, and I lose paths of genuineness to my heart while simultaneously assimilating the likelihoods of everyone, everything, and anything around me. I become the embodiment of the sentimentality that people can “rub off” on others; the utter and total takeover of a being that I once used to call home, a self-caretaker, and someone who lived for herself and her happiness, leads to my inevitable downfall and inescapable complete dismantlement. I fail to recollect my belongings and identity of self as even the foundational roots of my personality become overtaken by others. I lose sense of who I truly am deep inside of my heart and I become a poiseful yet stagnant statue in the face of reality. 

However, the thoughts that began years ago never change and have never stopped, as I constantly ask ‘myself’ “is this ‘me’?” to remain with some level of dignity, honor, respect, and pride to my former self--a self I never wagered or wanted to lose. Yet, I’ve never sufficed the ability to answer the question with complete confidence or unfaltering conviction as even the person answering was deterred from her sight of purity; she became biased. 

Social anxiety overrides your mind as if it were a parasite, and it’ll feed off of your thoughts and enunciate those words a million times over until you mentally snap and become trapped in an impenetrable loop of never-ending doors and thirty-foot drops. It’ll force you to change who you are, dictate the life you lead, and ultimately, write your life for you as it also leaves an imprint on your psyche that may never leave. Ironically, social anxiety can truly strip you of who you are, as it leaves you chasing a tail that never stops; social anxiety will remove one or hundreds of pieces of your body--to the bone--and force you to ruminate as to who you are, but as you ponder, the changes never stop changing. 

The asphyxiation of the dense and clouded fumes, in truth, riddled words and overwhelming thoughts and perceptions, conglomerate into delusional beliefs and whirlwinds of irrational behavior like an addict to their drug of choice. The overshadowing doubts and dirtied beliefs become the muses of false realities and spur the creation of a plethora of worlds, however, none of the worlds include a dimension where truth is allowed. The livelihood and comfort of my life become dependent on false senses of stability and “ways things should be” instead of what would truly be best for me in the long run. The worlds begin spinning and spinning and spinning, traveling beyond comprehension, and through continuous distortion, nothing is ever formed. 

The psyche and the mind within convoluted distortions cannot comprehend how the complex framework it worked so endearingly hard to make sense of and cope with is nearly identically contradictory to the latter half of the same reality. As the mental fractures with every passing light of day and night through one day to one week to one month to one year to seventeen years and counting, my subconscious can no longer handle the pressure of the lack of coherence. My subconscious longs for stability however far back it needs to search within my memories to obtain. Through each contention between and throughout timelines and dimensions, the heart of my being has longed for the presence of a home, a safer place to sit, a calmer place to close her eyes, and a friendlier place to just be unequivocally her. 

I blink once. 

Unbeknownst to any soul in the universe, a mere fraction of an arbitrary second was enough time to owe fair dues to another shift in my eyes. An unprecedented version of myself has already thwarted foreign amendments to my heart; my feet dredge themselves through the weighted climate and environment of choking air and solidifying mud to triumphantly impale the ground, the very same ground I mentally fought wars to remain balanced on, a checkpoint. 

A checkpoint to scream that this person that I innately embody will no longer be under the hides of others, she will no longer accept the words of others as her own, and she will no longer be a replica; a checkpoint to scream that I was here, she fought for herself, and she fought with every last ounce of her will to live to announce that she has a voice and that she will be heard; a checkpoint that leaves proof that everything was not for naught, her efforts will be seen, and her mere existence was worthy enough to have a place on this amongst all of the other candidates on this earth. The checkpoint is not special, not unique, and is just one of the millions of eureka moments I’m bound to have in my life. 

The checkpoint was, in reality, a given.

It was a given since I barely knew who I was, I didn’t know if I liked cats or dogs more and I didn’t know why I was asking myself if life was worth continuing. Over the years, I had been collecting pieces of the world like trophies and failed to address what was truly mine; I made everybody’s personality my personality, I liked what they liked, I thought what they thought, and I gave space for them to be themselves in my bubble while forgetting I am also a being that takes up space. Inherently, through the accumulation of relating and contradictory personalities, I was no longer able to make sense of the same world in front of me, the same world I could touch, feel, hear, taste, and see. “This is easy,” I told myself, “I’m so stupid,” I told myself, “I’m going to go nowhere in life,” I told myself, as I became increasingly angered with how stumped and stagnant my progress in life had become. 

But, it was through this mental breakdown that I learned to be unapologetically myself. After all, what was the point of apologizing if I no longer found any intrinsic value in life? I had tried every possibility in the past, every personality, friend group, creative thinking, artistic style, fashion, makeup, content and media, interests, personality traits, you name it, and nothing gave me more life. My world began collapsing and pushed me to my wit's end, and I innately reversed back into that quiet, tiny, shy, and pitiful little girl. The little girl never gave her input on things but always kept a strong framework of what she wanted, and it was simple because she only wanted one thing, white rice with crispy chicken skin on the side. 

I didn’t give up my anger, however, I used it to be confrontationally and unmercifully myself; I spoke my mother tongue everywhere, I brought knowledge that only came with experience and studying to the tables, and I projected my creative inputs into anything and everything that I ever made and did. I became stubborn on just doing whatever shenanigan I wanted to, positive or negative, as long as it was aligned with what I wanted to do. If I wasn’t allowed to be myself, I would make sure I was being at least 99% myself. 

Alas, as the days blew past me and swirled around me as if they were wind with destinies, the melancholy bestowed upon my grieving heart. Everything that made up how my mind and body had functioned in the past had departed my newfound soul. With barren lands, my heart gained irreplaceable opportunities to find itself once more. Day by day, the notes of encouragement and hospitality that soothe my inner peace leave the crevices of my mind and through the slits in my mouth in my mother tongue as I begin to see the colors of the world in their purest, most authentic, unfiltered, innocent, unambiguous, and unequivocal forms. I open my eyes wider as if the crimsons of rubies, the warmth of oranges, the happiness of gold, lushes of greens, azures of blues, grandeurs of purples, and the beauties of the world before the same very two eyes that saw everything, desolation, and everything in between, had never left. My world had finally begun healing itself to be a prosperous and vibrant world as its forests regrew lush and dense ecosystems of diversity, color was restored, and any personalities I developed gained the innate rights to self-respect. My world had finally begun to heal itself to be a world where its bearer was allowed to draw breath from the same source of life, take up space, and exist as herself without shame.