Why must we attempt to be things we are not?
Older than we truly are, less afraid than we appear to be, ignorant to the emotions we must express.
At times, I think my ego can be larger than a male's. Why must I harbor a sense of self-indulgence? Who do I blame for this fault besides myself, really?
John Green, in Looking for Alaska, states that "grief does not change you, it reveals you."
That statement is remarkably simple, it brings that notion of a self that was always prevalent, yet hidden beneath a past satisfaction. A personality changes in a multitude of fashions and arrays and shifts and protrudes and dissipates. Yet when it is broken for the worse, the outpouring of grief unmasks a self that is entirely helpless. A total self, one that arrests all new change and is stagnant, like the water of a murky lake. The lazy water has its amalgamation of dirt and algae and particles; the personality has its memories and lost happiness and failed love.
And the water cannot thrive without an outlet, the basin of life doesn't transfer its energy to new places, it has grown old and clouded with its static misdemeanor. It needs a new passage, a river or a bay opening into new waters. And moreover, the personality is ever the same: invariable, disheveled and hopeless. Without its channel of sorts, it retreats back into its old self and changes for the worse, becomes bleak. The grief that it now keeps so close unleashes someone that was always there but never met, forever omniscient yet shy to the eye.
