Who Am I?

• Jonathon Abra, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2018

Who am I?

A question that people will ask themselves multiple times throughout their lives and still get no proper answer. The impossible question, who am I? Three simple words that cause so much debate.

If there’s one thing that I hate, it’s self-evaluation, so, naturally, here’s mine.

Who am I? The correct answer is, I don’t know. I can be categorised as “confident, brave and fearless” yet when a tense situation arises, does my flight response activate? I’ve written many stories that I was proud of at their completion, yet, I completely disregard them just a few months later, calling them “unsatisfying, boring or just plain trash” despite having friends telling me that they were good, great even. Am I just cursed to live a life that is unsatisfactory? To you reading this, do you believe that you are living the life that you want to live? The human race is a cursed one, based around materialism; we grow up believing that if we have "this or that" that we will finally have a complete and satisfactory life, and yet, the hole keeps growing deeper and deeper before, *poof*, there’s nothing left. I believe we’re already dead on Earth before we’re lowered into the ground. We create religions, buildings, cars, and theories of life across the universe just to believe that we are living some “greater purpose”. We’re all raised believing that we’re special, that we’re somehow different from the rest of the human race, that we stand out, that we’re grand and how many people reading this actually believe that now, yet, we keep up with the lie, telling it to the next generation so that they tell the next and so on and so forth. And for what? Lies only end up breeding more lies.

To answer the question of “who am I?”, I’m just like everyone else, a nobody, someone bred to believe that I could be someone, anyone and only to have it fall apart in front. I’m someone who likes materialism, like everyone else, falsely believing that this or that will make me happy. Why don’t we learn? I think that’s the bigger question that should plague humanity.