Hide & seek

I think often about the person I am right now. Going through my old diaries and I realize, somehow I am becoming someone I envisioned myself to always be but it wasn’t through the journey I had planned for myself. My view of life was very simple growing up, point A was supposed to take me to point B and then I would be, as they call it, ‘successful’ but it wasn’t as simple as I thought. There were so many twists and turns and often times I sat down and thought to myself ‘Will that little 15 year old me, be proud of who I am?’ and to be honest, often I felt a divorce between the two, I was torn, for a long time I felt that my childhood was not something related to who I was anymore and as I grew older I would never be able to make myself proud in the simple way I had imagined before. So, I made some mistakes and I consoled myself, telling myself that it was life and that I was not who I was once. Sometimes I felt uneasy but I kept going, telling myself that we don’t choose the people we become.

Ironically, life happened again and I lost some people who gave strength to that version of me who could not recognize my childhood self. I had no one to fall back onto and the only person there, was me, for myself. I decided to be the person with love because it was hard to find it anywhere else and love was what I needed the most. I tried to understand myself, I tried to think about all the reasons I made the choices I had and then for the longest time, I held myself accountable and guilty for the things I didn’t do, just because the people I loved did them. I could not fathom it, I could not come to terms with it. How can this be real life? How can you love something so endlessly only for it to break your heart? That is exactly where the risk lies when it comes to love, you never really know if it will break your heart or heal it. You jump into the puddle of love so unaware and then all it takes is one moment to be aware of everything. One moment to realize that all the other moments never mattered.

The problem was that I always held myself accountable for not being perfect, for all the sins of everyone I loved and I always held myself guilty for the things done to me by others and then, the things I did myself and once everyone was gone, it was lonely to live with myself and my misery. I tried to understand myself and take one wound after the other instead of them all at once. I decided to forgive myself.

I decided to forgive myself for everything, I tried to understand what things happened the way they did but to be honest, I still don’t know but I dont regret anything and I don’t curse it either. You see, when I look back, I see myself happy and choosing things that felt right to me in that moment, so why should I regret now? Why should I hold myself guilty for what could’ve been avoided? Sometimes in life we choose things that we feel right in the moment and that is what I often find myself inclining towards. I dont think I can run away from who I am, even if I’ve tried to do exactly that for so long. Deciding to love the person who did me wrong often felt like a crime and I used to tell myself that I am not supposed to love people who betrayed me for my love but it was of no use. Somewhat like a cold breeze on a chilly winter morning, loving people felt so natural to me and I tried to be someone who I was not, I tried to change myself into someone just to make people happy but now when I look back, all I see are lessons, I see experiences and I see how they made me who I am. I dont hold any regrets anymore because I am thankful for everything that happened and I still love, even though sometimes I feel afraid to do so but I dont stop myself from becoming who I am anymore. Forgiving yourself is never easy but why is it that often we forgive others but never ourselves? We deserve love and forgiveness from ourselves as well. We give it so easily to others. You’re always there for your friends but when was the last time you were there for yourself? When was the last time you tried understanding your own mistakes? Most of the time, we hurry into the chaos of life and repress any emotion we feel. We are so quick to distract ourselves from who we are, we find it so easy to run from who we are but no matter where we run, eventually, we just run back to ourselves.