Always Forget Who You Are

I am an 'adult'. My bedroom is painted ‘Bubble gum Pink’, and I sit looking around it on my baby pink tinted spread sheets, on the bed that has frilled dust ruffles joining it to the floor. While I hold the teddy bear that was given to me at birth tight to my chest, I see the amounts of stuffed toys and Barbies that my room has collected along over the years. A poster of the Spice Girls hangs clear on one of my walls, the one that hosts my doll house. I also have a jewellery box on the chest of drawers adjacent to my windowsill, but I don’t really use it. My wardrobe is full of purples and pinks, of skirts and dresses, of lipsticks that are too bold for my shade of skin, of eye shadows that no one outside of costume dress should ever be caught wearing. There is a picture on my wall of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ and his friends that my mother helped me to put up when I was four years old. 

There is something vastly wrong with the picture that has been described of my ‘adult’ bedroom, and that is that it was all determined when I was four years old.

With clichés that suggest things like ‘don’t ever change’, it is easy to begin to question what would remain the same if we never did, and, which idiot thought that this was a useful idea to be spreading throughout hoards of people. This is not to say that the materials that my bedroom was comprised of when I was a four year old are wrong or detrimental; it is more that if I had not branched out in the fourteen years since, that I would be determined mentally instable as a result of lacking emotional development, or development in any other kind.

There is obvious pressure in our culture to ‘stay true to yourself’ or, to ‘remember who you are’, but it seems that the potential progressions that could be made on part of the people following such barbaric instruction come as the ultimate sacrifices.
My advice is the very opposite. Forget who you are, and do it over and over until you have explored so many avenues that you have learned many things that others have not been able to. Be passionate with a range of things, and never define yourself as a man/woman of any one discipline. These are my clichés.

There is no shame in changing, and I think that this is a sensibility that is lost over the populous. Rather than acknowledging the changes of our peers as something that may be more beneficial to their learning, many greet them with sneers, then utter the dreaded remark, ‘you’ve changed’. It seems that rather the feelings of shame or embarrassment that we have learned to endure if any one of us has been on the receiving end of this comment, that instead, we should acknowledge the changes, as a positive thing. Imagine if I really did sit in a ‘Bubble gum Pink’ painted bedroom with stuffed animals and other knick knacks that I had when I was a child? There is no life to be had in that stale existence.

You are a goldfish and your bedroom is your bowl. Your job is to forget, to clear your mind of what you think that your personality entails and instead do what feels natural. For the fish, this is to part its tiny mouth and absorb the oxygen from the water. For you, it is to only do what feels exciting and happy. As for the fish bowl, it fills up pretty quickly. There are only so many castle and plant ornaments that can fit in there before you have to settle for what there is and stop pursuing the new things. Please, do not hoard. Clear out the fish tank and make way for the new, always make way for the new.

So keep in mind that the phases that people go through are so essential to their growth that no one group should be denigrated for doing what feels good to them at any one time; unless they never conceive of change; because change is beautiful. We should always be forgetting who we are in terms of interests, because the essence of who you are will always remain, and this is the most comforting thought. 


Never forget to forget who you are.

This Is Why We Can't Be Friends Anymore

It’s been years now since you smiled at me through the pre-pubescent and clammy hallway, and since I smiled back. I built our friendship on this smile, and others that I demanded from you as I shared what made me happy. I built our friendship on the ideals that we were the same and that you enjoyed my company, and I enjoyed yours. We listened to the same music and laughed at similar things; I cried with you over the deaths of loved ones and got angry with you when the other girls made snide comments. I built our friendship with you, on the smile that was once flashed from across a clammy hallway.

Now, when I look back to memories once lived, I recognise that this was not a simple smile shown to a stranger from the opposite side of an unknown area; this was not a welcoming and inviting ‘hello’ that made me feel warm to my core. In fact, it was snarky, it was arrogant, and it was insincere. Since that exchange, our whole friendship has followed the same theme. What was masquerading as kind or loving, was actually quite depraved. With you I’ve shared news of varying natures, and you have listened along, but you have never loved me completely. You say you love me, and you show me affection, but your heart is wandering to some other place during any hug, so that I am left feeling as though you may not even have one at all.

We can’t be friends anymore because I am not sure that you are capable of love. I have heard you say it, but only in the context of primary caregivers of which you are expected to love. I have seen you write it in cards or texts, and claim it quite a few times, but I have never observed genuine love in your eyes. I am an emotional human being, that feels deeper than is healthy, and you, where the cages of your heart should fall to show any true feelings, instead there is a cloudy glass wall that stifles any real cultivation. I am left asking myself if you are numb, and this makes me uncomfortable. We can’t be friends anymore because I am not sure I can understand a person who sounds like they have tape over their mouth every time they speak about a feeling. It sounds like you are suffocating, and if you are not, you are terribly empty.

We can’t be friends anymore because you hate my success. Sometimes you run over and beam with happiness, you must have received good news. When you reach me you will tell me that you got high distinctions for your class that you’ve been working hard on, and I will smile back and hug you with enthusiasm (because I can feel real emotion). I will bask in your success and share it with you because I feel as invested as you. But you do not return this sort of reaction, my friend. When I scurry over with my high distinction you flash your cloudy glassed smile, raise your eyebrows in uniform fashion and say ‘that’s good’. Every, single, time. Following this you turn to your left and then you go silent. There is no other discussion and I am left feeling sorry that I achieved. I am sorry my success hurts you, and that you can’t give me what I give to you in terms of genuine spirits. And because of this, we can’t be friends anymore.

We can’t be friends anymore because the snide smile that began the very foundations for which this friendship is based, makes me remove any future trust that I may have in you. Because the realisation that this was scripted makes me wonder if any moment I have ever shared with you is honest. You were young then, and so was I. I am so prepared to disregard that moment, accept that you may have learned and progressed. Yet, the other day I turned and saw you give this very same smile to a girl that you have expressed your disgust for on many occasions. Then it hit me, your mouth curved in the same way it did for me, your head tilted to the left just the same, and your eyes reached the same level of squint that I was granted; and for this, we can’t be friends anymore.