Who am I?

Who am I when no one is watching? And when I mean no one, that includes myself as well. Who is the real me? Who am I?

 Everything I think I am from the outside has been reduced to a mask. A mask the people around me, society, education, religion, culture, and environment have slapped upon my crude brain without my consent. I have been living a lie. I am not me. I have sabotaged my true self for decades. I have left him at the mercy of the faulty justice system of society. 

Whenever I tried to fix myself, I was trying to fix the mask. People judged me based on the mask they idealized me as. Every day has been a desperate attempt to fix the external mask, a sorry attempt to dust off my true calling to fit into a mold that someone else created for me. All this while the real me lay in a desolate land engulfed by shame, grief, and guilt. 

Who said that I cannot fail? Who threw me into this unrealistic sea of expectations? What am I without my achievements, my talents, my success, and my brilliance? Who am I without the mask? Why do I desperately try to hide my failures while I give in to the slightest urge to flaunt my conquests? Who am I afraid of? Am I ashamed of myself or am I afraid that I might lose the mask that this world loves me for?

Why do I look at my failures as something to be ashamed of and not something to wear as a badge of honor? I want to go back to the little kid and tell him that he is allowed to fail. I want to tell him that the trajectory doesn't always have to be on a steady rise. I want to tell him that failing is ok. Only if I didn't have the burden of maintaining the mask, would I have not let my failures be my drawbacks. I would have been proud of my setbacks, learned from them, and made a comeback ages ago. I was tricked by everyone to be scared of failures. I was forced to believe that my record must be as clean as a Greek marble slate. What a cruel trick to play on a little kid who was just getting the slight jist of his brilliance. 

I somehow believed that the trajectory would always be on the rise. No one showed me the possibility of life humbling me. No one prepared me for failure. Nobody warned me. Since I always won, I never learned how to fail. 

Who am I trying to impress? Why do I have to meet everyone's expectations? Why did I carry this titanic burden of other people's expectations for a decade? Why couldn't let go? It doesn't matter if I don't meet anyone's expectations, that includes my own. I have to be free. I have to salvage myself from this mental jail of expectations. Who am I without the yearning to look good in someone else's eyes? 

Who am I comparing myself with? Would I trade my life, my talents, my pleasures, my ideas, and my dreams with him? Would I trade his problems, his shortcomings, his traumas with mine? What is the point of all this? Why do I have to look at their timeline, their pace, and their methods? Who taught me this? 

Who made me feel that I was late? I am just on time. My time will come when it is supposed to come. Why has this wisdom eluded me for so long? Why am I participating in a race that doesn't even exist?