Calls from the Consciousness

By Charlotte Poon

I don’t need to feel my identity.

It’s a hassle, honestly. Having to feel something crawling and lurking in your chest every time something bad happens is disgusting.

I’m already alive, I don’t need to have another thing ‘alive’ inside my brain. I don’t want an identity.

I just want to blend in with the world. I do try, I really swear I do. But when I do, everyone will say I have no personality, and lacking a personality becomes part of my identity. When I stand out and be different, my identity turns into being unlike anyone else.  

Some are saying “I want to find myself”, “what am I really like”, no, you don’t. You don’t want to know. You don’t need to know something that is not truly knowledge, it is baseless and nonexistent. 

Hey. I never said self awareness was bad. You need self awareness. What’s not important about knowing how your actions and words affect others and what you’re doing to be productive?

Seeing a lack of self awareness makes my stomach twist with bitterness anyway.

Take a piece of paper, for instance. It is a piece of paper. You have to know that. It can rip, it can fold, it can be scrunched up. However, do you need to draw on it? 

What do you think? 

It is a piece of paper in a moving box with no way to open it, the paper powers the moving box, let’s say. 

To draw on the paper, you’d have to break the box to obtain it. 

Actually, the box is your body. Your physical consciousness. You. 

Would you want to break yourself to subjectively define your soul, which might not even exist? 

It may not make sense right now. You’ll understand one day, and it might not even reach you through words.

“Looks like this was written by an armchair philosopher,” he remarked. “Was he locked up in a jail cell or something?”

“Turn it over,” she said. “There might be something.” 

He turned the piece of paper over. It was blank. 

“Well if I don’t mind…” he was grinning with mischief. He picked up a marker, who knows from where.

“Don’t.” 

He was in the middle of writing a crudely offensive sentence. “Wow alright, it’s not that serious.” 

“Don’t finish that sentence.” 

“I’m done!”

It has been done.

Rationale: A piece about the importance of knowing oneself and the dangers of absorbing oneself in identity, more specifically, self concept. Whether it tells a story is completely up to interpretation.