We all view ourselves differently. I choose to see myself from the narrative lens of life. The same way Charles Dickens kept changing memories of his past to fit the person he was at the time, I see this lens as one that allows more satisfaction. What is my story? I talk about myself as a conformation of stories that I've heard from people around me. Every conversation I have is classified amongst various pages of what reflects as my own person. I am so embedded in others that as days go by, it gets tougher to try and distinguishing me and them. This is what makes my identity deceptive.

It is common to form ideas from what we read about others. This means that our personalities develop via outside input. As I listen to what others have to tell about themselves, all words and all letters combine to make some sort of sense that becomes a storyline, a combined storyline that I call my life. I have so deeply lost myself in the books of others that I cannot remember which parts are really about me. My memories are so destructed and altered that I have lost all sense of difference. I have become a combination of all people that are, have been and will be in my life.

All this makes me sick. A sickness that disables me from seeing the truth about myself. The truth that maybe I only exist because of others around me. I only exist because I suck meaning from what I know gives meanings to others’ lives. I myself, am nonsensical. My reality is defined within other people’s memories. There is a hidden simplicity in how life just makes no sense. Simplicity to me is nonsensical. The virus is the constant effort to try and define, and mean something and belong... We humans constantly want to belong. Belong to what exactly, nobody can tell. Anything... Anything so that we do not feel like outsiders. But think about it, could we say that there is at least one person in the world who truly knows us? I don't think many people would answer yes to this question. So, what is it about belonging to something if we never truly know what we belong to in the first place?

Aren't we all lost in the words coming out of each other’s' mouths, the words that we so repeatedly define as truth whilst ignoring the truth we know about our own selves?

I lost myself a long time ago. I lost myself the day I decided that my life was not interesting, intimate or emotional enough. The day I decided that everything I was and was ever going to be was mundane. Since then, I have been finding myself in continuous trial to redeem like a phoenix from the ashes within the lives of others. I only gain meaning as ones around me start dissolving. I strategically place myself in recollections and impressions that are not and have never been mine.

It seems like life is continuous, with every breath we take and every move we make. However, my existence cannot be classified as fulfilling some continuity where I remain the same as time passes me by. It cannot be classified into a timeless process. I’m an artist, an actress, so used to looking like anyone else, who has forgotten her real image. It always takes all I have to become someone else in front of everyone, and make them believe it. That is the only way you can make others forget that you are not who you are portraying to be. The problem is when you start believing it, too. When you don't remember who you used to be and when all your life becomes an act, an art.

I am a piece of art so beautifully crafted, becoming someone else with every brushstroke. The thing about works of art, though, is that you can only keep adding paint, and never go backwards, never delete the last addition you've made. This is why I can never go back to being an empty canvas or unshapely piece of clay. I can only keep molding myself to what I want to look like.

I wish we could all stop worrying about definitions, classifications, beginnings and ends and belonging... I wish we could all stop worrying about belonging to something. I wish it wasn't scary to look in the mirror. And I wish we could all love whatever we become that we call 'ourselves'.