here’s the podcast version (i prefer that you read this one)-

sometimes i wonder how many versions of me are walking around in other people’s minds. each person who knows me carries a different fragment. some see crumbs of a single dimension of me. others have glimpsed my deepest vulnerabilities. maybe the truest version of me is the one i have never fully met. i once saw a video that touched on this, a thought that lingered ever since.

the multiplicities of oneself.

people see the fragments i offer, consciously or not. there are versions of me alive in other people’s memories but long buried within me. i’ve healed. i’ve shed skins. i’ve built new ways of coping. i wear masks not out of deceit but out of survival. thin layers protecting what once broke.

and yet, there’s a longing i carry, a grief i bury, for the selves i’ve outgrown. the versions who loved too hard, feared too deeply, trusted too soon, protected recklessly, who existed offering too much of all within and too little of safety. they linger like ghosts at the corners of my mind.

maybe because i recognize fragments of that old self in some, i judge them the hardest. the flaws i see in them are the ones i most detest in myself, the version that haunts me, the one i try to conceal in shadows of pretense. the versions i’ve disowned live on in the faces of people who remind me of who i used to be, who i thought i had left behind.

there are smells that bring people back, songs that reopen old wounds. but sometimes it is not them i remember; it is myself. the weight of a version i thought i had left behind, the weight of a relic self that never fully disappeared. there are songs i cannot finish anymore. the third beat of a track makes my palms cold, my body tense, my ears sharp, and i skip ahead, not because it reminds me of them, but because this version of me refuses to face the one that existed then alongside them.

there is a strange, awful ache in realizing you will never be fully known, fully understood. not by your partner, your parents, your friends, not even yourself. you will keep becoming, unbecoming, becoming again. versions of you will rise, flicker, fade. the version of you right now, the one breathing as you read this, is what survived the storm. the sum of every bruise, every miracle. the only version you get to touch in the closest, tangible way.

so i choose her. not the one i was, not the one i hope to be. i choose this version, the one that stayed, the one that endured everything i thought would break me. the others are ghosts, a mirage of hues scattered through fleeting memories of what once was. this is the color that survived the burning, the version that endured everything i coped with, everything i coped through.

maybe i will never fully meet myself. maybe i’ll only catch glimpses. in the mirrors of other people. in memories that knot in my chest. in songs i can’t finish. life is a perennial loop of becoming. who knows which version of me will finally rest.

i am a mosaic of selves.

those i have buried. those i have shed. and those i project.

By Bhadra

evolving. becoming. being.