By: Zach Siddiqui, Humour Editor
With my $40 trip to Greece abruptly cancelled, I wasn’t going to give up on self-discovery. And that, really, was my downfall.
Ever since my brief stint as a volleyball player in middle school, I’ve felt a pull towards . . . ascertaining who I am, if you will. Mapping my mental expanses. How to put it in a way you’d understand . . . I needed to find myself. And I was sure as hell going to do it.
I was so excited to meet myself. We would take pictures together, and travel together, and memorize my social insurance number together. You know, all those things they say are better to do with a friend. Of course to the outside world it would look like I was doing them by myself. But I and I would know.
And if I wasn’t going to get to find myself in Greece, I was just going to have to find me here at home.
Stupid, I was, invoking the magic of a binding vow like that. Enchantment like that, it settles over your residence, over your bones.
In the end, I came across it on a Tuesday, gently wedged between my washroom mirror and my turbulent-at-best sense of self.
It stared at me like I was nothing.
I’d found myself.
Wretched, the other “me” was. In these eldritch conditions I could see past veneers to the truest quality of this counterpart. Thousands of terrible eyes like voids — wait, I think most of those are just pores — self-sabotage scrawled across skin, no sense of timeliness to speak of. All these things radiated through its body like light. No: this creature has never known light.
I fled into the darkness of my refrigerator, to no avail.
From then on the apparition emerged in all sorts of places. On Wednesday I found myself buzzing and suckling from an empty San Pellegrino. I looked at myself, and I saw things, terrible things: I saw that I complain about no one texting me first as a defense mechanism to avoid acknowledging that I’m the one who doesn’t text anyone first.
Thursday came and I manifested under my desk. Fleetingly I registered a cozy sweater, the kind you get at Value Village, and a fresh obsession with the #quarantinecouture hashtag. Looking down on myself, I found that I vocalize criticism of power structures not to pose actual opposition but to absolve myself of responsibility for my complacency within those power structures.
Just this morning I found myself shuffling around on my dining room table, all pretense of subtle haunting dropped. Upon my table I discovered it as it stress-snacked and recoiled, discovered that fact that when I say “self-care,” I mean “I guess my roommate can pay my credit card bill this month.” Ghastly, truly ghastly.
Tomorrow I will likely find myself at the bottom of a wine glass, and I’ll realize that my next flaw to unpack is my chronic oversharing problem. But, you might be thinking, if you already know what’s wrong with you, why wait until tomorrow to deal with it?
Because, little classmates, I know now that confronting your problems head-on is the darkest art of all. Better by far to swim in the light of bliss, unaware of your own identity, believing you’ve never done wrong at all.
