I have always struggled with identity. How do I define myself? Is it through the roles I play throughout the day? Is it through my sexual orientation? Is it through my achievements? I think the most important question is do I even want to define myself. What does that even mean – to define one? Often, I try to learn about other people’s life journey and take what I can learn from these amazing experiences.

Maybe, just maybe, I have done more absorption than to fit the pieces together. This is the story of my life and I am in charge of each and every aspect of it. Or so I think. Being the lead actor, director, producer, cinematographer and the rest of the cast is exhausting. Well, it’s a roller coaster ride; sometimes I’m happy, thrilled actually, other times I’m in an emotional trance and then comes the occasional sadness followed by self-pity. Then I lose myself to this painful trap of who I want to be at the moment and who I am actually am. None of this makes sense, but I can read it and I can resonate to it.

Perhaps, it’s because it’s my own hand writing and I can see it and understand it better than someone else. I have been scared of failure, the thought of being attached to it horrified me and so I tried to be strong (be a man, that’s what society says). “Man don’t cry”, they say. So I just ran, as far as I can from weakness. I didn’t know that I was allowing a dead pile of things I cannot change grow. I know better now, well I try. You know what they say about old habits, they die hard.

God, I have grown. I stare at myself and I remember who I used to be and I am not the same person anymore. I am proud and yet I’m not there yet. So I keep on writing scripts and scrapping them, hoping to find the perfect one. We all want to live the dream. At this point I don’t have the whole picture in mind but I can see small fragments of it and I stir the boat to that destination. It’s a lot of fragments, some I just store away for the future and others I work on. One at a time and it’s frustrating but I enjoy it (sometimes, other times I stay covered in bed the whole day).

At this moment, I can’t tell which direction I’m moving to. However, I woke up with hope and determination to start over and build up. Maybe no one else will relate to it but I will live to tell it, the story of finding myself.

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Tell us: Do you relate to this way of finding oneself?