I never thought I was interesting enough. I never thought I had enough of a personality.
I didn’t have opinions or preferences. I would go with the flow, sit back, allow other people to make decisions for me. I wasn’t there, anywhere, not really, anyway.
When I started to feel, slowly defrosting after a long, cold winter, I could see it — my personality, my soul, my aliveness coming to the surface.
It scared me how powerful I was. It scared me how big I was becoming. I thought often, “how will people view me?” What will happen when they do?
The biggest question and the one that scared me the most was, “what will happen when I don’t care about what people think anymore?”
Freedom. Freedom will happen.
That scared the living shit out of me.
But I kept going and living and defrosting. Because it was the only way. I would reach in to the depths of my soul, cry, and scream and yell, and then finally, hum. I pulled to the surface everything I could find down there. I showed it, expressed it, and imagined myself in a new way. Born again. Again and again.
As I continued to be reborn, I also got a little more interesting. With each death and rebirth, I gained an opinion, a preference, maybe even an expression (on a good day). I slowly was someone. Slowly becoming.
I realized something about being interesting, and why I previously looked up to people who were. Being interesting isn’t about your story or your narrative. Yes, I had to sift through a lot of my own childhood shit to get through it, but that’s not why I started to get interesting.
It’s not about my identity or what happened to me. It’s about the process of uncovering all of that, to get to who I am at the core — unique, complex, and absolutely nothing but interesting.
The Black, Asian, LGBTQ community is not interesting to me. It doesn’t make someone a more interesting person if they are queer.
What interests me is, what happens to them when the systems we were prescribed to doesn’t work for them anymore?
What next?
It illuminates people’s fears, doubts, and insecurities, right then and there. We are forced to confront ourselves. Forced to choose — ourselves or them.
We are forced to meet ourselves more deeply, and shift ourselves in order to remerge, with awakened souls.
What’s interesting to me is self awareness, global awareness, and systems awareness.
What’s interesting is not who you are when you try to fit in, but rather, who you are when you don’t.
I complained for so long about not being interesting and good enough. I fought myself on it, forgetting so easily that was what interesting to me, was already inside of me, waiting, patiently, to resurface itself.
