Being Me

Being Me

Sometimes, I like being Me.

I like My eyes when they’re defined with teal eyeliner and sparkles.

I like My bangles that jangle on My wrists as I type, and the rainbow-coloured mantra beads that shine in the sun, and the moonstone ring I got in Bangkok for 50p.

I like being Me.

I like the fact that birdsong and sunshine and blossom on the trees make Me smile and feel golden inside, and the bluebell oceans I like to wander through, singing.

I also like the Me that uses semi-colons and subjunctives just because I can; were I less grammar-wary perhaps I wouldn’t be Me.

I like My love of rainbows and unicorns and forest faeries.

I like the Me that uses Olde English spelling just for the pleasure.

Sometimes, I like being Me.

I like this Self that the spontaneously unfolding conditions of creation have formed just as It is, now, never before, never again.


But, sometimes I don’t like Me.

I don’t like the rigid, defined, unchangeable Me that seems to exist.

I don’t like the Me that thinks she’s a ‘Me’ with ‘Mines’.

And this Me longs to be free

from definitions and labels and borders and edges and to naturally

live in a soup of experience without rules and to confidently split her infinitives and

misplace apostrophe's and not feel a twinge of non-conformity

to the dictionary-world where all beings are separate like mushrooms (see Hobbes’ de Cive for that, but I’m not looking up the exact page number and paragraph to cite it conforming to Harvard’s demands)…


sometimes I wish it could be…not Me…but we, or maybe it…or just

anything but the black and white outlines of a colouring-book page

that is begging and screaming for Me to colour within the lines,

each section a neatly segregated cordoned-off area.


And I wish I could dissolve into the boy sitting next to Me solving algebraic equations or the flowers sitting pleasantly outside my window or the squirrels chasing each other around a giant, sighing oak or the white whispers of cloudmaterial wandering across the sky…


or all of them combined, unfurling, undefined…


Sometimes.


But then I catch sight of My beads and My bracelets and I like Me again.

I like the Me that allows Me to recognise You, and Your needs.

The Me that knows that sometimes it makes sense to make sense,

no matter how I wish it weren’t so.


I suppose, in the end, We must humbly devise

a way of compromise

between the Me that lets You be

and the we that sets us free…


By Byul Ryan-Im


Tags: Identity, judgement, nature, acceptance

Post Date: Jun 2016