Who am I?

I keep asking myself the same question, as if saying it often enough might force the universe to answer.

Who am I?

The question follows me from place to place. I move quickly...too quickly...chasing solutions that shine brightly for a moment and then shatter before the month ends, slipping through my hands like fragile glass. Each time I think I’ve found solid ground, it gives way beneath my feet.

There was a time I loved something so fiercely that I emptied myself into it without measure. I gave until there was nothing left to give, only to be met by silence.

A hollow, unforgiving silence. Have you ever been trapped like that...stuck to a dream the way glue clings to skin? Years pass. A decade, maybe more. Failure becomes a familiar companion, and the world begins to ask the question out loud: Why do you keep doing this to yourself?

I rarely answer. But deep inside, in the quiet marrow of my bones, I know why. Long ago, my parents planted something in me...a stubborn seed that refuses to die. Never give up, they said. And that seed grew roots.

So I try. And I try again. I try until sleep becomes a stranger and my nights turn into rushing rivers of thought. My phone holds a thousand names, yet in my heaviest moments, there is no one I can truly reach. Surrounded, yet alone.

They tell me my habits are a disease, something I should cut away to survive. But how do you step away from what shaped you? I stand wedged between a rock and a hard place, pulled by duty, by memory, by a hope that refuses to loosen its grip. “Change,” they insist. “Become someone else.”

But become what?

Someone lighter? Someone untouched by disappointment? Someone who doesn’t feel the ache when the world goes quiet?

Sometimes I look into the mirror and barely recognize the person staring back at me. Is that who I’ve become...a stranger, a shadow, a ghost of a future I once believed in?

I search my own eyes for answers and find only questions looking back.

And yet… I rise.

I rise into the night, into the endless hum of effort and endurance. I rise because quitting is a language I never learned. I rise because somewhere beyond the exhaustion, beyond the failures and the echoing emptiness, I believe something is waiting.

Perhaps one day, past all this weariness, I will finally meet her... the version of me I’ve been searching for all along.