You lose yourself quickly in trying to be all things to all people, or even many things to many people. You start to forget what matters to you, trying to keep the people around you happy, even if they're not people who you particularly like. Or maybe you actively dislike them, but still, something in you compels you to accommodate, to twist yourself into shapes unrecognizable to you yourself, so that they will like you. And eventually, the contours of your personality are gone. You can no longer ask yourself what you want, because it's like speaking into a void. You don't know what you want, or even how to want, beyond a desperate grasping at transient affection. Life goes on, but what kind of life?
My junior year of college, my roommate starred in a play and I went to see her perform. It was a fairly forgettable production, but there was one scene I often recall. She was stretched out on her stomach on the ground, head up, arm out, reaching. "Love me," she wailed. "Love me."
Love me. And yet, when people do, often it makes me resent them. I feel like they love the me they want me to be, the me they think I am, when really they know nothing about me at all. How could they, when I know so little about myself? I feel like their love has cost me too much. What I need is not love, but someone to show me myself.
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