Maybe I’m Not Me. Maybe I’m All of Them.

Did anyone ever describe you in a away that is so far off from how you perceive yourself, that it shatters your entire perception of reality?

Well, I know it’s happened to me.

How is it possible that your family, your friends, your partner, your neighbor, and even your pets all have a different idea of who you really are?

How is it possible that my mother often calls me selfish, when one of the qualities my closest friends love and mention most about me is my kindness and generosity?

Who’s right? Or maybe neither of them is. Maybe I’m a third person no one’s managed to uncover yet. Am I a fraud? Am I tricking everyone?

This kind of “polidualism” has always made me reflect (and honestly, confused me) since I was a child. Like a lot of teenagers, I grew a wild, primal, almost animal hunger to get to know myself - to stick labels on who I was, to better understand my identity. I hoped that once I found the reasons behind the way I felt certain things, acted certain ways, and thought certain thoughts, that heavy curtain of questions hanging over my head would finally be torn away.

I put myself through a sort of personal screening: personality tests, analyses, online quizzes, religious and spiritual texts, I even went through several rounds of therapy.

I wanted an answer for everything. I didn’t want a single doubt left about who the hell I was.

But I soon realized all those labels were too tight. I felt like I was more than that diagnosis, that orientation, that personality type, that faith, that analysis.

Everything I felt, experienced, saw, observed, the way I lived my life, couldn’t be reduced to a simple name or an anonymous acronym.

It just didn’t capture me.

That doesn’t change the fact that every one of us still needs to feel recognized by something greater than ourselves. To feel part of something. To not feel so alone in the universe.

We need to feel seen, to feel like we’re not losing our minds; because out there, there are people just like you.

Don’t get me wrong, discovering yourself is crucial and necessary to feel at home in your own skin.

But it’s just as important to remember:

There’s more to you than that definition. There’s you.

Yeah… but who am I, really?

I’m quiet around some people, because something in me tells me not to trust them, like a kind of selective sixth sense.

I’m a hurricane of joy around others, because my heart feels safe and I know they’d never judge me; in fact, they’d probably join my chaotic dance of euphoria.

I’m shy around certain people, because I don’t know them well enough to show my full colors. Or maybe because they intimidate me and I want to proceed with caution… because I’m the kind of girl who falls in love easily.

So then, which one am I, really?

I've been asking myself this question for years. It was only recently, after reading a beautiful book on Buddhism ("Profondo come il mare, leggero come il cielo" by Gianluca Gotto), that I began to find a clearer answer.

I’m all of them. I’m everything. I’m the entire universe. And so are you.

Because there’s no dualism in this life. There is no real separation between me and the world, between spirit and matter, between mind and body. Everything is One — or more precisely, not-two.

The divisions our mind applies — inside/outside, good/bad, self/other — exist on a relative level, but they’re not absolute truths. Because those divisions are just illusions.

Imagine You’re in a Dream.

In the dream, you’re the dreamer, maybe walking through a city. You see people, objects, houses, the sky, and everything seems real. There’s a you (the subject), and everything you perceive (the objects).

But then you wake up.

And you realize: everything - you, the other people, the streets - was all made of the same mental substance. There was no real separation between you and the rest of the dream. You were everything. Everything was a unified expression of the mind.

Because the ego doesn’t exist. It’s nothing more than a mental construct, invented by humans to bring order into chaos. A convenient convention.

Look at a photo of yourself from ten years ago: that person is not you. How could it be? Your face has changed, your hair, your thoughts, your dreams, your life.

Everything changes. And so do you. Constantly, inevitably. Like water endlessly flowing through the bed of a river.

So why do we cling to labels, to identities?

If we truly realize that nothing lasts in this life, maybe we’d start to focus on what actually matters. On what truly exists:

The present moment. The perfection of life as it happens. Right now.