Why Me?

I was at the end of my rope when I discovered that the end was on fire! My life was bare of any pleasures, my existence a mere formality. I was the loneliest person that the earth had ever seen. I was helpless just drifting through life with nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to. The alley through which my life was passing now, did I come here myself or had fate forced me to do so? Questions like these and many more tormented me day and night. Was it my own doing?


The impregnable layer that I had built around myself, it was to protect me from pain and misery. Alas! It had brought me these same. Nobody had I allowed to break through to the real person inside me. Maybe for a short while I had felt secure and happy. However, these moments of joy were short lived. The mask had been accepted as the real me. I was understood as a person that I was not but a mere fabrication of my imagination. The people had befriended and loved that fabrication. I was left alone. No one understood me. The friends needed in difficult times were there and trying to help but their attempts were futile. They were helping not me but one who only existed in my mind.


It was all my doing. Friendships are built upon bonds of trust and I trusted nobody. Hence, there was no real friendship. People can help you if they understand you but I had blocked every access to my self. The result was a forlorn, friendless and helpless person.


I was there, I talked and I laughed but after so many years of protecting the original identity inside me I was not there properly. It was as if I was somewhere else looking at others and my own movements from a distance wondering whether I will ever be able to share the real me with someone.


I had a quality. I could analyze any personality around me and discern its likes and dislikes. However, I abused this gift of nature, bringing about my own doom. To my friends, I had presented a personality that was an instant success. This made me restricted. I tried to be the all pleasing person which was a killer mistake. A mask is amusing for some time but then it turns out to be suffocating. It can’t be worn all the time. Maybe what prompted my course of action was a feeling of insecurity and a fear of being rejected.


With time things took on a new dimension. A personality crisis erupted within me. Who was I? A deep depression ensued drowning me deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of my own woes. I had no sense of identity. To others I was the same old and calm personality but within me was a storm of gigantic proportions. Calmness was a word unknown. It was as if two mad armies raged war on each other. I drew into myself. Closing the few hidden gates through which help could have arrived. When people laughed, they seemed odd. There was no point in laughing as there is no happy ending. I somehow managed to make peace with my inner self. It was only a transition from an open war to a cold tactical war.


On some days I sat down to think; to reconstruct the real me. It was a slow and painful process. Memories, happy and sad alike produced a longing within me which could never be satisfied. In these moments, guilt came and hit me with such ferocious force that shook me to the bone. I wanted to relive those moments, without a mask to disguise. I wanted to be there again but this time as a person that truly resided in me.
I was a person who had tasted two wines, both equally potent and intoxicating. However, they could not go together. Invariably one had to be left to enjoy the pleasures of the other. Both had entirely different worlds. I had tried to enjoy both and now one world was within me and the other around me for most of the time. In effect I became not one but two personalities. The problem was that the two were extremely opposed to each other. Up till now it was thought that they could not co-exist. How they came to co-exist in me still remains beyond my grasp. Many had treaded the path that I took but no one had reached the destination where I stood. Why they failed and I succeeded is unfathomable. The point is that though I succeeded in achieving what others could not. This very act brought about my fall into the bottomless pit through which I am falling to this day.


The dilemma I faced was that people would not believe if I showed them both sides of my personality. I would be ridiculed. So I constructed a new person with whom I shielded the real person within me. Perhaps here lay my mistake. I should have chosen one part of my personality and pursued it. However, this mistake cost me everything in life; happiness, friends and a personality.


They like the laugh of A, so I laugh like A. they like the questioning look on B’s face. I copy that look, cheating expressions and adopting reactions. Anything I did was not original. Everything pre-planned, every move made to please.


A person is known by his reactions and expressions so virtually I was unknown. A gulf was being created between the world and me and I was powerless to stop it from growing. I was a lone island, bare from any fruits of nature, waiting for the relentless sea to finally drown me. The sea was slow, bringing in a little salt every time it came in. To deposit in my wounds, keeping them open and prolonging my agony!
Sometimes I think I was not at fault. What had I done; something that every other person did. I had tried to bring together two extremes. Perhaps disobeying nature brings such wrath. But then again why was I successful? Why me…