When the masks come off...
Why do I always try so hard to please others? Why is it always that, in an attempt to make myself seem more “presentable” to the world, I always hide who I am? Everyday, I feel as though I'm putting on a thousand different masks, one for everything that happens to me and everyone whom I meet.
Though I present myself to the world as a confident, highly opinionated girl who isn't afraid to tell you what she thinks and doesn't care what people think of her, the opposite is actually true. I am confident indeed, not to mention opinionated to the extent where I may give others a bad impression of me. However, I am all that and more.
So much more.
I am self-conscious. What people say about me affects me deeply, though I don't show it all the time, and I cover my emotions with a smile. I have actually taken a leaf out of Fai D. Flourite's (a character from the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles series) book and learnt that anything can be covered up with a smile. Any pain, sadness, anger or hurt can be masked so easily by a lifting of the lips. Essentially, it's just like 'makeup'.
The price for such a solution? You forget how to smile with your heart and eyes. It gets to a point where you smile, really smile, and then secretly wonder if this smile is genuine. Deep in your heart you know that it is, but then why do your eyes feel so cold? Why?
The only times I really smile? When I'm alone, with friends I trust (like my secondary school friends and those from TP Dramatec), or during rare moments when I'm so genuinely happy that I cannot express in words how I feel.
My strong opinions are another matter I need to address. My need to voice out and project as confident an image as I can stems from habit. When I was younger, I used to be taunted and bullied for my big forehead. Over time, I learnt that as long as I didn't even look remotely intimidated by the idiots who came after me, they left me alone. And so I adapted. Bit by bit, I chipped away at as much of my fear and weakness as I could, and replaced those empty spaces with confidence and fearlessness. In short, I pretty much changed myself.
I liked how confident I became, and how others seemed to like it too. However, there will always be times when I offend others with my attitude, and when that happens, I feel really awful. I mean, I had no intention of making anyone upset so when one of my friends stopped talking to me all of a sudden, I obviously thought I'd done something wrong again. I worked up the courage to apologise to him, and when I did, he just told me that I hadn't done anything wrong, but we'd never be as close as we previously were due to 'personality differences'. I was like, "WTF???" I guess I've gotten over his bitchiness, but still I sometimes wonder what I did wrong.
The thing with me is that I take friendship very seriously, in the sense that my friends are really that important to me. The problem is that I think I'm jinxed. Every person who I've called my best friend has ultimately hurt me a lot and then left me after three years. I mean it, every person, without fail. And this has been happening from Primary One, can you believe it? This is the reason why I'm so afraid to lose friends whom I've become way close to. This is the reason why you won't hear me saying that I have any best friends. This is the reason why I will call no one my best friend. Because then maybe my jinx won't come into effect.
I can't believe I held all this to myself for so long, but then again maybe it's a good thing that I'm finally letting it all out. If anyone has anything to say about this, if anyone wants to hurl insults at me, what can I say? Speak now, or forever hold your peace.
Though I present myself to the world as a confident, highly opinionated girl who isn't afraid to tell you what she thinks and doesn't care what people think of her, the opposite is actually true. I am confident indeed, not to mention opinionated to the extent where I may give others a bad impression of me. However, I am all that and more.
So much more.
I am self-conscious. What people say about me affects me deeply, though I don't show it all the time, and I cover my emotions with a smile. I have actually taken a leaf out of Fai D. Flourite's (a character from the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles series) book and learnt that anything can be covered up with a smile. Any pain, sadness, anger or hurt can be masked so easily by a lifting of the lips. Essentially, it's just like 'makeup'.
The price for such a solution? You forget how to smile with your heart and eyes. It gets to a point where you smile, really smile, and then secretly wonder if this smile is genuine. Deep in your heart you know that it is, but then why do your eyes feel so cold? Why?
The only times I really smile? When I'm alone, with friends I trust (like my secondary school friends and those from TP Dramatec), or during rare moments when I'm so genuinely happy that I cannot express in words how I feel.
My strong opinions are another matter I need to address. My need to voice out and project as confident an image as I can stems from habit. When I was younger, I used to be taunted and bullied for my big forehead. Over time, I learnt that as long as I didn't even look remotely intimidated by the idiots who came after me, they left me alone. And so I adapted. Bit by bit, I chipped away at as much of my fear and weakness as I could, and replaced those empty spaces with confidence and fearlessness. In short, I pretty much changed myself.
I liked how confident I became, and how others seemed to like it too. However, there will always be times when I offend others with my attitude, and when that happens, I feel really awful. I mean, I had no intention of making anyone upset so when one of my friends stopped talking to me all of a sudden, I obviously thought I'd done something wrong again. I worked up the courage to apologise to him, and when I did, he just told me that I hadn't done anything wrong, but we'd never be as close as we previously were due to 'personality differences'. I was like, "WTF???" I guess I've gotten over his bitchiness, but still I sometimes wonder what I did wrong.
The thing with me is that I take friendship very seriously, in the sense that my friends are really that important to me. The problem is that I think I'm jinxed. Every person who I've called my best friend has ultimately hurt me a lot and then left me after three years. I mean it, every person, without fail. And this has been happening from Primary One, can you believe it? This is the reason why I'm so afraid to lose friends whom I've become way close to. This is the reason why you won't hear me saying that I have any best friends. This is the reason why I will call no one my best friend. Because then maybe my jinx won't come into effect.
I can't believe I held all this to myself for so long, but then again maybe it's a good thing that I'm finally letting it all out. If anyone has anything to say about this, if anyone wants to hurl insults at me, what can I say? Speak now, or forever hold your peace.
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