Who Am I?

 It is a simple question, but whenever I try to answer it, I feel like it becomes one of the hardest questions there is.

If someone asked me who I am, the first thing that would probably come to my mind is that I am a sensitive person. But the truth is that answer makes me a little uncomfortable. Not because it is false, but because I don’t like the idea of that being the first impression people have of me. Sometimes sensitivity is confused with weakness, with overreacting, or with something that should be hidden, and I don’t want a single word to be enough to summarize everything I am.

The problem is that I don’t really know what other word I could use. I have never found the right way to describe myself. I can talk about my interests, the things I enjoy, the things I do, but when I try to go deeper and answer who I truly am, I feel like words are not enough.

I think part of the reason is that I feel like I am constantly changing. My interests change, my way of thinking changes, the things I care about change. Something I used to love can still be part of me, but in a different way. My love for BTS is still there, for example, even though I am no longer the version of myself who was completely immersed in the k-pop world. But something from that version of me is still here: that intensity with which I love things, that excitement I feel when something truly matters to me.

Maybe that is why it is so difficult for me to find a definite answer. Because the person I am today is not exactly the same person I was before, and it probably won’t be the same person I will become in the future.

Even so, there are things that always seem to follow me. One of them is nostalgia.

I feel nostalgic for many things. For people, for moments, for stages of my life that are already gone, and even for memories that I don’t fully remember anymore. Since I was little, I could miss previous versions of my life, like my kindergarten years, even though I don’t remember every detail. It is strange to miss something you can’t fully recover, something you might not even remember clearly, and still feel like a part of you is still there.

I think that is why my room says so much about me. It is messy, but it is also full of pieces of my story. There are pictures because I like remembering. There are books and things I have written because I need to get my thoughts out of my head. There is a Chilean flag signed by people from my exchange, because it represents a version of myself that existed somewhere else, where nobody knew me and where I was able to discover a different part of who I am. There is another flag that represents an important part of myself. There are little pieces of my life scattered everywhere.

Maybe my room knows more about me than I do.

There are also parts of myself that are difficult to explain. Sometimes people assume I am arrogant because I have a serious expression or because I cannot always hide when I don’t like someone. But the truth is that I am just a very expressive person, and sometimes my face says things I never meant to say. The reality is completely different: I am much more insecure and sensitive than I probably seem.

There is a little girl inside me who still exists. That little girl who cried over everything, who got scared easily, and who felt everything too deeply. Sometimes she appears when I am afraid, when things become overwhelming, or when I need someone to remind me that I will be okay. If I could sit down and talk to that younger version of myself, I think I would tell her that she doesn’t have to worry so much, that she will survive things that seem impossible right now.

There is also a contradiction that I think represents me quite well: I want to be a private person, but I can’t help oversharing.

Maybe that is why I write.

My journal has always been a way of surviving certain days. There are things that are too difficult to say out loud, but they still need somewhere to go. This blog is an extension of that. The difference is that now other people can read my words and maybe find something familiar in them. Maybe someone will feel understood. Maybe someone will need to know they are not the only person feeling this way.

I still don’t know exactly who I am. I wish I had a clear answer, an explanation that could organize all the different parts of me and finally tell me: “this is who you are.” But maybe that answer doesn’t exist.

Maybe I will never stop discovering myself, because I will always be changing. The person I am today might be different from the person I will be next week, next year, or ten years from now.

And maybe that is okay.

For now, I am a notebook that is still being written. I have pages full of words, pages full of eraser marks, pages with doodles in the corners, and pages that have not been created yet.

So, who am I?

I don’t know yet.

But I guess finding out is also part of who I am.