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.