Written by: Simone Shree Pathak - 24026, Grade XI
Posted on: 14 July, 2022
You feel like an extra character of a novel who already has their future written in a paper. Each day you feel like you are waking in a dream and your life isn’t actually real. You start questioning yourself if you are even real. You start losing your self esteem seeing all the cool people on the internet and start basing your whole personality off of them because you don’t feel good about your current self. You aspire to be like them, live like them and become them. You make their personality yours and people comment about how you’ve changed yourself for the better. You feel good about it but you fail to notice that you’ve lost you. Once you notice it you start feeling pathetic about yourself. You try to please everyone with a smile and mask your true feelings. Then you begin to question yourself if what you are feeling is truly what you are feeling or is it something you are pretending and imitating from someone else’s personality. You look at yourself in the mirror and are very estranged from yourself. You don’t recognize yourself. When you say your name you feel like your name doesn’t belong to you. You feel ugly and miserable but you still continue what you were doing. Everything you want to do makes you question whether you really want to do it or it’s because you saw other people do it. You lose touch with yourself. You start questioning yourself and your reality. Then this vicious cycle continues again and each time you lose yourself more and more. You lose self esteem and confidence while trying to be validated as the people you see on the internet. You start to hate everything and then you ask yourself if you really hate everything or if it was just a personality trait of someone you read or watched about. You fail to remember what your personality was originally like. You go through a surge of negative emotions and you begin to hurt yourself and your loved ones. You remember your childhood self and feel so disappointed. Now how do you find your lost se—
“So professor, how do I find my lost self?” I asked the guest professor who had visited our university to give us students a lecture. The professor chuckled at my question.
“Just get off social media and go to a therapist!” He said while laughing.
There was then a surge of laughter. Every student was amused by his answer because they had expected an actual solution. While the students were laughing, the professor sighed with a smile on his face and his eyebrows whimpered. Just then the Professor got a phone call. It looked urgent seeing his face all shocked and he concluded his lecture. “And that is what it feels like to have an identity crisis. Well then— Goodbye” He said with a smile. The lecture was not completed and a lot of students weren’t satisfied with his unfinished lecture including me. I was disappointed in getting a half hearted answer but I didn't fret much about and headed to my next class. Till this day I regret interrupting him while he was talking. Maybe then I could’ve got my answer.
