Most people I knew were impatient. They called themselves things before they did them thoroughly or experienced them enough. Then, there was me, still thinking twice before I called myself a writer, still wondering what it meant to be a human being. They were impatient and a bit smarter than me, and I despised it.
It was all a farce and a game too obvious, but I refused to participate. They were all too proud. Proud of the first label they could put on themselves, proud of their hefty vocabularies, proud of long terms which meant nothing when you were walking on the road, and then there was me, proud of myself and nothing at all, simultaneously. I often wondered which was better, but I knew I wasn’t worse. I had nothing to blame on when I made a mistake.
I was deliberate, perhaps, too deliberate about calling myself anything because it was a huge responsibility, in my eyes. Once you called yourself something, anything, your entire life would by definition, have to revolve around that thing. Of course, others didn’t think this way. Hence, their ease at calling themselves anything
Me, well, I didn’t wish my life to revolve around anything. Often, I wished it didn’t revolve at all. In my opinion and experience, when you called yourself something, you ceased to exist, and you became muddled with everything that came before and everything that came after. You became a plural noun written somewhere in an essay or chronicle, and that didn’t sit right by me.
When you called yourself something, you also got full of yourself and a bit too proud and pompous and protective of the word. Although, I wonder how nice it might feel to belong for once, but I couldn’t bear the cost. The cost that came with calling myself something was too high. To lose myself to belong was too steep a price.
So, I spent every day saying “no” when someone called me something. It was a tedious day every day. I did many things, or so I liked to believe, but I couldn’t call it anything. I couldn’t call myself anything. If you called it something, you got full of yourself, and it ceased to exist.
You ceased to exist.