My Identity Crisis Liberates Me

Who Am I? Whoever I Want To Be.

At 12:03 am, when the world has gone to sleep, my half at least, I sit here staring at this big fat computer screen. It isn’t mine, my dad brought it from the office when ours broke down.

Tech around the house has been weird lately, acting cursed. I wrote a $1 a word assignment on an old laptop that can only have one window open at once.

Dad just renewed the TV subscription, but it doesn’t interest me anymore — not as much as it used to.

Things have changed now. I’m a different person today and I’ll change again by the time the clock hits 1:03.

I spent a long time believing I don’t have an identity, that I just morph into whatever, whoever the situation needs me to be. It’s not always something I like and it’s not something I actively get to choose, but I don’t hate it so I get by.

The variety intrigues me. There’s a new surprise every morning — who will I be today? Will I get featured in the New York Times or will I obsessively imagine scenarios to throw myself off a cliff?

My life has been an oscillation between pride and disaster. I love me and I hate me and often it’s both, at once.

I spend a lot of time trying to peer inside, see if there’s a permanent human in there somewhere. Someone who doesn’t go from being an e-commerce seller to feature journalist in a month. Someone who has a name that doesn’t go from being ‘Luna’ on one website to ‘Sakshi’ on another.

Are you in there? Can you hear me?

Sometimes there are sparks of intense spiritual connection — when time stands still and I rise above this facade of identity and realize, I’m not a name, profession, age, gender, color, title, relationship or hobby.

I may briefly identify with those, but it soon fades to eternity and I’m back in the middle of nothingness. Just me and time. Still and breathing.

I look around, I sharpen my ears — I pray someone calls out. I hope the real me steps forward and tells me who she really is and why there are so many of us. How am I supposed to know which one’s real? What do I do with all these other identities I’ve carried along, buried somewhere deep inside my spine? Who decides which one pops out when? Who made them? Why are they here?

Are you in there? Can you hear me?

It’s not always sad and confusing though. Most of the time, it’s fun. I get to be a lot of different people in a single lifetime. I get to chase 10 different careers in a span of 6 months. I get to trash my failures and start afresh over and over, doing a new thing in a new place with a new name.

I get to choose personalities like clothes. I get to stretch, mold, weave, sew, color, and style them to suit the occasion.

It’s not about any extroverted tendencies, charm, or power of persuasion. I have a knack for knowing what people want and serving it to them on a platter. Because I can. Personality is my kitchen and I make me whatever you hunger for.

But it’s not always this exciting and limitless.

I miss me and I don’t even know who she is. I don’t have anything to go back to.

It’s like walking into a party with a brand new dress and having nothing to change into while going back to sleep. There’s no such thing as pajamas for you, or a bed, pillow, sheets. You don’t have a home because you belong nowhere.

You are everything and you are nothing, both at once. It’s thrilling and depressing to be limitless yet perpetually trapped.

So what do you do then? Where do you go when you have no one, nowhere to turn to? What do you do? Where do you go when it’s all done?

Are you in there? Can you hear me?

You find one within.

You see, the deep, complex truth about life is that — it’s ephemeral. Rebirth or not, we come here, hang around for a while only to leave again. Maybe we come back, maybe we don’t.

But one thing’s for sure — we are here, now. For this life, for this moment.

And right here, in this very second, you hold that choice — to be whoever you want to be.

None of us is born into a profession or a personality, we get to choose and develop both as we go along life. So why not be everything, as and when you feel like it? Why not go where your heart calls?

Once you get over the ‘have to’s, ‘must’s, and ‘should’s, life will be just as limitless (and sometimes terrifyingly uncertain) for you as it is for me.

Yeah, sometimes the not knowing is overwhelming. In those moments, just be. Not something, someone, or somewhere. Just be.

That’s how you’ll know you’re here, that you can indeed hear ‘me’.

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