Myself.

Standing in the comfort of my own bubble, I was quiet. Thousands of unique voices echoed throughout the hallways of my junior high school, yet not a single peep was from me. One may have heard the musings of someone else's words carefully paraphrased from the corners of my lips, or ideas that could be overheard by the teachers at my school lopsidedly repeated from a voice that sounded like mine, but I have a secret: it was never truly me speaking.

I searched from under the beds of classmates’ conversations, over top of their ambitious laughter, and in every crevice of every word I overheard to craft myself an identity.

Junior high was consistent. As I went to the same school from kindergarten to Grade 10, every social and physical mapping of my main setting stayed the same for most of my life. I knew what cafeteria food would be sold depending on the date of the month, and I knew when I was allowed to stay inside Study Hall for recess and when I was not. Every person, in my small grade of 75 people, recognized who I was, and I to them.

Why would anyone wish to change something that was so easy to figure out?

As a young and easily influenced child, I was taught to hold a strong belief in God, which became the first viewpoint I adopted without question. I devoted myself to following God throughout most of my life, which helped me gain the favor of my peers and educators. However, in retrospect, it could be viewed as the beginning of a potentially hazardous pattern. Almost like plagiarizing other people's personas, I continued to attach those ideals I saw in other people to myself. My favorite color was blue because my best friend's favorite color was blue. I loved pizza due to the raging popularity of pizza parties, all of which my classmates constantly strived to gain by the end of the year by persuading my teachers. Being kind seemed like the right thing to be, in both God's eyes and the public, so I morphed myself to fit that quality into my resume.

I was like a collage of mismatched fabrics; there was absolutely nothing special to who I was. As a result, transitioning from everything I knew to a completely unknown high school environment was an insanely comedic pain for my character.

"There are no blackboards ", was the first thing I wrote into my journal when I saw my high school for the first time.

The lights lined the ceilings of every classroom and faced a different direction. Every clock looked to be a different model. And, worst of all, people flooded every inch of any conceivable space in the hallways. Everything was going to be different now that the school had an insane population with wood flooring in most of the classrooms.

There was not a single person I knew, so I was fully in this alone.

How could I copy the personalities of friends if I had none to reference?

I admit it; I was lonely.

Entering my TOK class with nothing but a pencil, paper, and a heavy conscience set up the beginning of what I found to be the hardest time of my life. I could not make personal connections with every person in my grade due to the crazy size of it, unlike my junior high, so I made no friends at all. Trying to fight off the bug eyeing my sandwich outside on the grass during every lunch was miserable. Group projects made me gag every time the idea was ever brought up, as I knew I was going to just be pushed to the side in place of everyone else's existing friend groups. I knew this fully, and I understood this as just another part of the social structure at school. Only having ever based myself-worth on other people's perception of whom they saw me as skewed my high school experience greatly, as nobody could really tell me who I was anymore.

Sure, I tried to find myself in past diary entries, and I scavenged the dark depths of social media to try to get any hints or clues as to who I should be. Looping in an endless circle of both self-pity and self-hatred gave me a scrap of whom I thought I could be, although it was only ever negative and from a selfish place of the heart. The whole period felt like a huge roadblock in my otherwise smooth arts and crafts activity, as the scissors did not work, and the glue dried out. I cried out to even the Lord, but I never got a response back. It was as if I was dramatically left on read by the whole world, and I would finally have to find a different way out of this fork in the road.

To pass the time, I drew pictures. My teachers may not have appreciated when I would sketch poses or landscapes during their lectures, but, if you were to ask me, I would have said that I paid attention quite swimmingly. During this temporary disconnect from talking to other people, I was stuck in my head a lot) and drawing was the method I used to get those thoughts out of my mind and onto the paper. Right after my math test, when I still had 30 minutes left after my completion, I doodled as I always would. However, it was not my usual character design or forest that sat on the page. Instead, a symbol seen on every holy book, with a giant question mark on the side stared at me on top of my loose-leaf paper.

I remember hearing the ambient sounds of pencils scribbling algebraic equations, the teacher saying that there were 10 minutes left until papers had to be handed in, and suddenly feeling ashamed. I erased the drawing instantly, but the thought never left my mind. I could never have anything against religion, but perhaps the thing stopping me from stepping out of that bubble to explore the other beliefs that the world offered was that elementary impression that left a permanent mark on me.

The mark was, after years of decay, slowly peeling off. The feeling of disgust targeted towards me for feeling such a way did not leave, but that did not stop my curiosity from getting the better of me. Going from looking at a distance to properly exploring the unknown, I found out so many strange things about myself that I had never known before by focusing solely on myself instead of looking to outside sources for direction. For one, my favorite color was red, as it was a much more passionate color than blue and looked beautifully bright. I hated corn to an absurd extent, no matter how much my parents tried to convince me that it tasted good. I dipped my toes into a more varied palette of video games and figured out that I enjoyed open-world mechanics more than I thought I would.

Most importantly, however, I found that I was being far too evasive from my problems, one of which was being incredibly lonely than I should be. As such, for the first time in my life since elementary school, I allowed myself to step out of the rainbow-colored soap bubble that I was used to into the more erratic, unpredictable side of my world. In English, I went up to one of the people that sat next to me and said hello.

When I look back, I know that this period was crucial in order for me to be as comfortable in my own skin as I am today. If my scissors still worked, and the glue was still in perfect condition, I most likely would have kept cutting parts of other people off and sticking them onto me as I would have had no incentive to change a system that worked for me. Despite how hard it was at the time, and the countless sleepless nights I had desperately clinging to my junior high days in deep melancholy, I came out of it all in one piece. I found my "soul" on the other end of the island, tying up my scraps and pieces into something harmonious.

Coming a long way, from having no friends at all to a growing list of people whom I adore, was worth it in my eyes. I may not necessarily be a better person, but I can strongly say that I am, at the very least, my own creation. Because the arts and crafts approach no longer worked, I picked up a pencil and started doing what I have always known to do- sketch. The pencil has not left the page yet, and it probably never will as I keep venturing through my own personal story.

However, one thing is for sure, as I keep refining the shadows of my character, I will continue to struggle. Yet, struggle and failure are not something to be feared, as one can only uncover their purest selves at their most vulnerable of moments throughout their journey of discovery. Where the individual should look is underneath, as one may find a masquerade of markers patiently waiting to be used to create something even more colorful than ever before.

Due to it being instilled in my mind for years as an impressionable toddler, the first opinion I ever stole was one regarding how much I believed in God. God was the idol I followed for almost all my life, and it did me wonders in getting my teachers and classmates to like me.

It could be considered the start of something dangerous.

~Anonymous.