There have been multiple times when I’ve told myself, that I was putting myself way out there, giving way too much of myself, and yet other times, it doesn’t even feel enough. I try to trace it to a period of my life, a time when I didn’t even know what to put out or what was even there to give.
I have these memories, several of them from my childhood, but somehow they never really feel like mine, it’s like I’m recalling someone else’s memories. For instance, I recall my childhood best friend and I bonding over our unfortunate luck of being first daughters and our annoying younger brothers, sitting just outside my house, it doesn’t feel like I was myself, rather, like I was a stranger sitting across two girls, watching them as they talked and laughed, neither of them taking notice of me, and yet I know that I am not the stranger, but the dark skinned ten-year-old, sitting next to the other girl, yet… I can’t help but feel more like the stranger than who I was supposed to be.
The very first time I felt conscious of my existence, of the fact that there was a soul in my body and it was mine, that it was me who was thinking these thoughts and living this life, feel as vivid and as real as something I can taste and feel, like the acidic taste of an orange peel on my tongue, touch like the wall in my room on that day. It was the first time I didn’t feel like just someone’s daughter, a bowling ball set to roll down the alley, a boomerang that would always return.
It’s a cliché, but it was my first night alone in my room, at my University. I remember lying on my bed, I kept the lights on, and staring for a really long time at the blue curtains covering the window. My heart was pounding like it was going to break any moment, it was probably fear, sadness and regret, I’m not sure, but I had never felt more alone, and desperate than I did in those few minutes before I slept. The next morning when I woke up, I was still alone, still in that room, and the air still smelt strange, but that was when I knew that even if I closed my eyes over and over again, nothing would change the wave of ‘new’ and ‘different’ that was about to hit me, and my only choices were drown or learn to swim.
Going to school away from my family and everything I knew meant more than just going away, or ‘freedom’, for me it was ‘rebirth’. I was forced to be myself, explore who I was, to recognize and accept the things I liked to do, the pieces of values, opinions and ideologies that made all of me, and most importantly I was taught bravery.
I guess when you’ve lived so much of your life not knowing, hiding, and observing, when you finally get the chance to not just see, but to be, you become a sort of good news you want to share with the whole world.
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