If I Ask Who You Are What Would You Say?

If I ask you what happiness means to you, what would you say?

That feeling of having dreams or the ones in which they become reality or those moments when they turn to dust but you have people cheering you up anyway?

If I ask you what sadness means to you, what would you say?

Is the absence of the people you once dared to love, is it absence of your own peace of mind? Will it be the unawareness of time passing? Having nowhere to go and no one to meet? Lying in someone else’s bed and thinking of someone else? Living in your skin but wanting to be someone else? When you keep going left when you desperately want to go right? When you want to go forwards but you keep moving in reverse into the opposite direction?

If I ask you what guilt is, what would you say?

Something you destroyed? Something you couldn’t protect? How you couldn’t protect yourself? Your heart, your mind, from people you knew were out to destroy them? Not being able to see the signs before? Giving up on things you didn’t want to let go? Or not giving up on things you wanted to give up on? Losing something you wanted to treasure for a long time? Or something precious fading away and it makes you go crazy?

If I ask who you are, what would you say?

Would you list your name, place of birth, date of birth, your favourite actor/actress, what you wanted to be when you were younger and how now it seems impossible to achieve, how you keep going backwards, how happiness is lost to you, how sadness surrounds you, how afraid life makes you, how afraid love makes you, how many times you wanted to cry today but couldn’t? What would you tell me?

Now, people say “ignorance is bliss” and to some extent, that is so true, but when it’s about you, if you don’t know what the hell is happening to you, within you, how it is impacting your outer self, how much this confusion of how to live is eating you up, you need to take steps to save yourself.

We all think that someday we’ll meet somebody who would solve us, or even better love us just as the mess we are, and maybe that is true for most people, or not, but for the rest of us, getting stronger through our own strength is the option that we have left. And this strength comes from knowing what happened in your life, and how it changed you, and whether this change was good or bad, has it made things better or worse, you need to your limits for you to cross them, you have to know which boundaries people shouldn’t cross in your life.

If you don’t know yourself, nobody else will. Just try, alright? Just once?