To The Other Piece of Me:

There are some days when I feel as if I am living through a shell of myself, pressed up against a careful, glass facade of fulfilled social expectations. That piece of myself, someone comprised of every desire, hope, and fear, dreams only of the day when she can push through, reaching across to grasp at every opportunity life has to offer. There are moments when I wage a war against myself. Frustration pours out in rolling waves as I take the inevitable leap and choose, instead, to step back. Just when she comes through the cracks, fear restrains me and I pull away.

In my head, I hear my own voice, the one that comes from her and she longs to tell the world, “I am here.
I’ve grown up alongside her,
Sharing her triumphs, her joys, her failures.
I have stood by,
For every scraped knee,
Every beach day basking in the sun,
Holding onto Momma’s hand each rainy day as we splashed in puddles with our green rain boots.
Everything.
I have been here for everything.”

Today, I write to the other piece of me. You, like every hidden persona within all of us, are something we should not hide. You are better than the imagined images of ourselves because you are real. You run deeper than skin, trailing down into our very beings as the one person we are made to be. You are captivating, as you intertwine with the complex feelings and emotions that make us so wholly human. You feel love and joy and laughter that the frame of ourselves could not ever hold. The other piece, made pretty with the artificial things of the world, is nothing more than a glass container. Transparent, temporary, and, more often than not, plastic.

And yet, we are all irrationally afraid of the opinions of the plastic personas of the world. We wake up believing that, like everyone else, we should keep you hidden so that we may conform to complete an unfulfilling picture of hollow human values.

In the midst of expectations, we often forget what it means to admire ourselves first. It isn’t vain, nor is it arrogant to remember how far we have all come and how immensely valuable our inner selves truly are. It has become a great factor in our lives to be loved by others, but in chasing after the external, we forget to cultivate an image of compassion for ourselves. In the wise words of Stephen Chbosky, “We accept the love we think we deserve.”

So, I choose me.

Your friend,
Noelle