I often ask myself a question, “What do I have?” and then, judge myself on the basis of the answer that I receive. I look back at life and wonder what I have accumulated over time and by that, I don’t just mean material possessions but also success and importance. I think about my achievements and count them on my fingers. I think about my progress in terms of grades, my financial independence, my skill set and my ability to achieve my goals. The answer never fails to disappoint. My hands are not empty but they are not as full as I would like them to be. My shoulders loosen and I collapse under the burden of not having enough.
Today, I thought to myself why the answers haunt me. Is it wrong to question? How is my self worth always so negligible? Why do I simply never have enough?
The one mistake I have been making all this while is asking myself the wrong question. I must ask and then, expect an answer but that only applies when the question I ask can also be justified. I change the question today. I ask myself “What I am?” instead of “What I have?”. You might be wondering how this change of question is not simply an attempt at convincing myself that I am good enough but a genuine concern about my self worth.
The truth is no matter what I may or may not have, it has absolutely nothing to do with who I am. Everything I own, ranging from things to skills, may make up a part of my life but they do not define my very self. They can determine who I am but define, they cannot. Even if you take away what I have, I will still be who I am because what I have can be temporary but what I am is permanent. Hence, the right question needs to be asked.
So, what am I? A human being. A student. A girl. Just that? No. None of us are ever only what we had written in our third grade essay about ourselves. We are always more than that or sometimes, less than that. We make that decision. We may do it consciously or subconsciously but never completely unconsciously. I ask myself now, “Am I kind? Am I loving? Am I giving? Am I content? Am I optimistic? Am I honourable? Am I self aware? Am I the person that I admire so much? Am I the person I would love to meet on a bad day? Am I a friend worth having? Am I forgiving? Am I determined? Am I existing beyond what I have?”
I could be half of these things and I could be all of these things. I could be none of these things. I didn’t know. I never cared to ask myself all these questions as often as I asked myself if I have the confidence other people had or as much as I asked if I had the success the world taught me to run after. No one asked who they are. This is when we all lost ourselves. We fooled ourselves and told ourselves that we were running after building a new identity for ourselves but all we were ever doing was losing ourselves in the process and becoming robots and machines and all things that could be materialised. We measured our self worth in numbers and we lost count of the humanity within us because wait, there is no scale ever created to measure that?
Or is there?
Comments