the demons in us all

Are we really what we are or are we everything we are not?

What exactly are we? Are we what we think we are or what others think we are? Perception or reality? What’s the difference? Or what does it matter!

How we long to know ourselves, day after day, forever! How many “selves” do we have? And which one dominates? If 10 people think of us in 10 different ways are we all 10 of them? Or are we sum of all?

Is our very existence relative then? We exist, or we believe that we exist through the eyes of beholders. If all on a sudden, they cease to acknowledge that we exist, do we still exist?

Our existence is confirmed by the fact that people see us and recognize us to be existent. Our life is essentially a journey for recognition; recognition for our “selves”, our state of being alive, marks that we left on the paths that we had started our journey on. We don’t exist in us. We exist in others. The feeling of “me” is obscure. It loses its strength when it resides in “others”. And the others tell us what we should be and should not be, what we should do and shouldn’t. We believe that we are pretty because we have heard others tell so. At one point that becomes conviction. Perception becomes reality. We try to please others, we try to be others. Others become our identity. We become labeled. Mother thinks I’m kind, my colleagues think I’m an asshole. The rickshaw puller who scratched my car thinks I’m the angriest person on earth; two signals away, the little girl who sells flowers thinks I am the sweetest! Which one is real? Who I really am?

We don’t know what we are. We don’t know what we want. We meander around and try to find the meaning of it all. What is the driving force? What exactly is “us”? At times, when we wake up deep at night, our soul has left our body and raised above, we get a glimpse of our soulless body down below. A sense of innate wonderment as to who we are overwhelms us. The body with no sense of belonging tries to attach itself with the soul, the very “us”, raised above. In that electrifying moment, for a few moments, we become the “others”, and see how “others” see us. When we wake up the next day, it’s all gone!

The universe conspires to make us believe in a certain way. One day, in a winking moment, that changes. The gentlest boy in the class begins to kill while a serial killer sheds a tear for a puppy that was run-over at the dawn. We change our “selves”, the labels.

We are angels, we are demons. We are soulful, we are wistful, heartless. We are all we are not, we are nothing we are. And when the door of perception closes, we cease to exist!