Sometimes I wonder why we refer to ourselves as 'you'. You are not alone, we tell ourselves, or,you can do this, and sometimes, you can't keep going this way. Why do we feel the need to talk to ourselves like a stranger, simply glimpsing at individual events of our life? Maybe because we are strangers to ourselves. Maybe, instead of being one person with one name, we are really many people, with different names, stuffed in to one body and sewn up for appearance purposes only.
And each different person is inside us for a different reason and they all have different jobs to do. The one with the swollen eyes and quivering lip is there so we can feel pain, the one with bleach blond hair and sparking eyes helps us feel happy and inside everyone is that one person with spiked green hair and a twinkling nose ring that pushes our buttons and turns all the gears to make us unique and different from everyone else around us.
But inside everyone this is the one person with waist-length, jet black, hair. The one we run to when we need comfort. The one who holds us when we need to be held and laughs when we laugh. That one person who knows everything about us and, even with this information, doesn't judge us. Because this person knows what it's like to be judged and this person knows what it's like to feel alone, they know what it's like to have no where to run and no where hide from the problems that taunt and grope at our minds.
Of course, there is always that one person inside us with a shaved head and coal-black eyes. The one that speaks the truth and terrifies us. We keep this one in the shuttered and dank part of us, caged by cool, slimy, iron bars to keep it silent. We force it into a world of muteness because we can't cope with it's yammering. It accepts it's solitude and speaks only when it feels we've crawled off track to the point where we need to face the reality of who we are and what we've done.
The people inside us don't always get along though. Sometimes the one who wants to cry alone in a corner gets tormented by the forever-happy blond and at times the one with spiked hair dances on the others last never by singing very loudly and very off-key. Once in awhile, the one with the shaved head breaks free and flashes small, vivid, slices of truth before us, causing heavy waves of happiness and pain to wash over us. But this doesn't happen very often. Usually the people inside us have an unspoken air of peace around them, they understand that although they are all different and that they also have to live in one larger vessel. A vessel that is who we are, the vessel that holds our hopes and despairs, our joy and our sorrow. And, of course, this vessel also holds the many different people who make us the person that we are.