Figuring out, me.

How are you supposed to figure out who you are in 500 words? How are you supposed to know who you are when all your life you’ve had people covering up for you, making mistakes was a part of life and everything was risk proof? Hi, I’m seventeen, and I have no idea who I am.

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If you ask my parents, they will tell you stories of a little girl, who ran down the corridors, asked too many questions and never sat still. The girl who always played with her toys and made up wonderful stories, who dressed up as a pirate and the bunk bed was her ship. Who made up games and plays and weaved stories for the younger kids and saw magic in every ordinary thing. Who always had her nose buried in a Sudha Murty or an Enid Blyton and looked at everything with eyes wide with wonder.

Reading gave her a different perspective than most, it helped her see the world not through just her own eyes of all the characters she had read, all the lives she had lived. She never stopped reading. She read to live a little better, to go to a world filled with colours, to bring those colours to those around her, she read because she had fallen in love with magic. And because she knew, deep down she would never stop till she made the whole world see it.

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If you asked my friends in middle school, they won’t be able to tell you much. She was the girl who sat at the back, never spoke to her much, she seemed nice though. She’s always reading, we have never actually spoken to each other. I don’t know much about her. As she grew up, she learned that the sky was blue not because the raven- haired Maya had wept blue tears , but because of refraction, she learned that the flowers were coloured by chromatin pigments, not painted by the fairies. And that even though they have inherent goodness in them, people were not always kind , like in the stories.All endings were not happy and some dreams never came true. She learned that the world was not how she saw it, that there was crippling darkness and friends don’t always mean what they say.

She buried herself in mountains of books, retreated into her prison of words and kept reading. She read to escape , to somehow vanish , because when she read a book, she was a part of that world and she never wanted to come back to reality. She began reading like an alcoholic drinks, addicted to his poisons and unable to deal with what life gave to him. Everything seemed too suffocating, and it physically hurt when she did not have a book in her hand. Her mind could not stop screaming and she needed words to shut it down. So she began writing. She wrote a story about a fisherman, who drowned himself in the sea, a student who never found out who he was meant to be and a coffee mug that got thrown away because one day, it broke. She wrote sad stories primarily, because her world was blurred. She could not see clearly , she could not see the world she used to see. She had lost her vision.

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If you ask my friends from high school who I am, they’d tell you about a kind and sweet girl, with a scary dark side. The kind of girl who’s always there to help you out, to listen to what you have to say. The kind that always has your back and has the brightest smile in the day. Who makes you feel better and never backs down. Who has her head in the clouds , only because she’s dreaming of a better place. And studying hard to get that place down here. Who talks of centaurs and and leprechauns and will punch you in the face if you disrespect Harry Potter.

She reads to be set free, she reads because she loves reading. She reads because it takes her to places all of her own, and to take her friends there too. She reads so that those who hate books won’t have to.

I don’t know who I am , yet. But I know who I have been. I've been Anne , from Green Gables, I’ve been Feluda , from Kolkata, I’ve been Sara Crewe and Jo March , and Luna Lovegood and Tintin, the list is endless. Every story I’ve read is a part of me, a small fraction of who I am , those stories are what make me , me.