An Outfit That Isn’t Mine, Summer 2015
I remember what it felt like to be unafraid.
What it felt like to be blissfully ignorant and full of faith in people and the world.
I remember when I didn’t know what heartbreak felt like.
When I didn’t know what it meant to have someone utterly and perpetually let you down.
When I didn’t know the deadness you feel inside when you shut off your heart.
When I didn’t know how to shut my heart off at all.
Back then I used to love so freely.
I didn’t guard myself, I didn’t hold back, I didn’t hide within myself.
I wasn’t haunted by ghosts of a former life — a life long gone.
I remember who I was then.
Who I was, and who I wanted to be.
But I’m older now, and the world doesn’t feel so bright.
It is, but it doesn’t FEEL that way sometimes.
And even though everything I want is within my reach, and happiness is all around me…
…sometimes I feel like the outfit I’m wearing isn’t mine.
Like it’s a costume, and I am meant to be this other person, somewhere other than here.
But how can that be, when it is the sum of my decisions that put me here in the first place?
And what does that mean, when the sum of you isn’t you at all?
It’s someone else.
But that someone else is the person you have become.
What do you do then?
You march forward wearing the skin of a stranger, I guess.
And you try to reconcile that stranger with the person you once envisioned.
That unafraid soul, dancing boldly in the light.
Laughing.
And so I laugh and I dance and I march in this outfit that isn’t mine.
And sometimes it feels right and sometimes it doesn’t.
And sometimes I’m unafraid and sometimes I’m not.
And inch by inch I drag myself back toward that place of carefree happiness.
And choice by choice I reinvent the person I have become.
And I remind myself to turn my heart back on when it shuts off.
And I remind myself that there is beauty in the chaos.
And that the path moves forward, always forward.
And that’s fucking adulthood.
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