How Well Do You Know Yourself?

I went to sleep in a different skin – one that clings to my muscles and paints the perfect picture of a character I try so hard to be.

In the morning, I woke up in the skin I grew into from a little girl, reunited with my own self again.

For professionalism's sake, it is a daily battle to drown her. Because she feels too much, stalls in silence – carries worry like a relentless hunk of roadkill behind her back at all times. When you need to be ruthless – to be a leader, a mover, a dominating force – you can't have her clinging onto your ankles like winding ivy that refuses to die.

In an ideal world, the two would meet. Not only that, but thrive together. A precarious amalgamation of soft and hard, chalk and cheese, fight and surrender. So I can walk through my daily life with the steely confidence I reserve for the office, and I can let go of the dread of showing emotion in any environment that isn't my home.

I think of all the different versions of myself that must exist – all just fragments in my mind like the glittering colours of a kaleidoscope. The girl who has never fully recovered from a mother who never understood her and a father who didn't ever try to. The wife who wants more from her life than the four walls of her home and the ticking time bomb of a nuclear family. The lover who is passionate and overflows with the everlasting push and pull of want and crave and give and devote.

The woman cursed with a watered-down Jekyll and Hyde within her, both in love with living and fearful of the concept altogether.

Sometimes I wish I could start all over again. Who would I be? Would I forgive myself? My family? Would I carry confidence in my pocket at all times like a lucky charm? Would I open my heart freely instead of guarding it so fiercely? Would I spend the rest of my days in the arms of countless lovers, all with different faces, different hands, different mouths, and different lives?

I don't like to talk about it much, but I already know this is going to end. In my darkest moments, when the world curls up at the edges of my vision like a paper vignette, I see the foaming mouth of the sea. She's quiet now, but she won't be forever. In the back of my head, like an itch I can never fully scratch, she beckons quietly.

Come home, come home, come home, she says.

One day, when my bones are tired and my brain has nothing left to give, I will walk right into her open, welcoming jaws. There will be no further deliberation. Not anymore.

My only goal while I am living is to chase the things that give me the same rush as the thought of coming home to her does. As long as I do that, I know the rest of my years will be happy – no matter which version of myself I am today.