Soul Note

"The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much to you.” - Claudia Rankine (Citizen, An American Lyric) 

Who am I? The scariest question you can ask yourself. It worries you that of all people in the world you don’t have the answer. If someone were to ask you, you know your mind would go blank and then you would try to replay your life in fast motion and nitpick the best parts of it to share. How do you answer that question? And why don’t you know? 

Walking around as yourself, whoever you are, everyone you encounter has their own perspective of your identity. How you carry yourself matters. How you dress, talk, who you hang around, what you say, it all matters. So that then, they can shape you, and put you in a file folder stamped with their own perceived category of who you are. The stamp does not go away you can not draw over it and sometimes the ink bleeds through onto the pages kept inside. 

You contemplate your own values. Do they mean as much as other people's values? You find yourself in your head a lot. Thinking about whether or not you’re living right and doing the right things instead of just living. What will you become? Where will I end up? You feel separated from yourself. You want to be one thing and act one way, but when you go out into the world you find yourself being something else. 

I knew who I was from a very young age until suddenly one day I didn’t. Every day is another chance to improve. You hear this saying a lot and often forget that who you are is solely up to you. No image of yourself is permanent you think. But that can be hard to remember when there is someone new subtly telling you what file you belong in, to them.