Many Faces, Many Places

"Along that road the man went
And down that road they went,
The man he was, The man they saw,
And the man he wanted to be"
(Micheal Wakefield)

I read that piece a long time ago. Just after high school actually and I loved it so much that I wrote it down somewhere on the back of a book I can't throw away. (That phrase is the reason I can't throw it away). It described me at that point perfectly. I was fresh out of high school and I needed to redefine myself. In my mind I was no longer a girl. I was a woman. I wanted the boys to see me, the girls to envy me and everyone else to bow at my newly experienced feet. Those were good times.

Every so often I remember the paragraph and yesterday was one of those days. I am quite comfortable with who I am right now but sometimes I wonder if I really am who or what I want to be. That's when it hit me that I am myself at every single moment of my existence. When I lie, I am being me....When I am angry, I am being me...When I pretend to be someone I'm not, guess what,I am still me.

It's quite hard to run away from yourself so it is easier to compartmentalise everything and show different people different things. Show them just as much as they can handle so that they don't judge your insanity for what it is. I can say for myself that I am a friend, a best friend, a "mboys", a workmate,an employee, a daughter, a sister and others. With each of these roles comes a whole new me. Who I am as a daughter is not who I am as a "mboys". (Let's just say there are some things my mother should never know)

We are not less of ourselves because we give less sometimes. It's just that on some days and to some people, we only allow so much to be seen of us. Either the person we really are, the person other people think we are or the person we are trying to become. That's why people have expensive suits for meetings with big clients and spend all their money in an expensive restaurant to impress a girl or the expensive prada shoes you wear every time you have a bad day.It may not be who we are everyday but it is who we are at that particular moment.

All of us show one of the 3 people above at any given moment. We are our real, crude selves to our closest. We are our best selves to those we wish to impress and the we are the people we want to be when we look in the mirror but at any given time, all we can be is ourselves.