this is different to my other posts, written in raw, frenzied catharsis as i contemplate the person i’ve become.

Rachmaninov Concerto No. 2 playing right now, the only steady rhythm pulsating through my life.

I know exactly the moment I switched to non-capitalization, and now I feel as though I cannot go back; the desire to impersonate someone I looked up to, the chance to appear cool and relaxed and indifferent and therefore liked, the feigned confidence that filled my insides as I soon grew a faint superiority complex, as I somewhat subconsciously moulded my new identity on shaky foundations: Natalie Lam has really obscure music taste and aesthetic Spotify playlists, she listens to Indigo de Souza and Fiona Apple and is too above this world, a world that has wronged her. After the trauma of last term (oh, which she still hasn’t gotten over and probably won’t for the foreseeable future – clutching onto her wounds because she is a Beautiful Tragic Woman of Enigma but also because last term really broke her and she doesn’t have the emotional sensibility nor energy to actually deal with it internally), she still cannot fathom the idea that spiteful, insensitive people exist; more importantly, she cannot fathom the idea that they set their sights on her.

Declaring that this term was going to be her era of self-revitalization, she starts a blog because she needs the world to know her thoughts. Everyday, she obsessively checks her blog’s statistics to bask in the comfort that people are stalking her, that despite no advertising, people are intentionally going on her site. Actually, a pattern emerges: she also frequently revisits her whole-school emails so she can dramatize the attention; every morning she curls her hair and does her makeup to look good for the people she will encounter; she dresses well for the off chance she comes across someone she knows on the street; she lets her personality be defined by the colour of her nails – because honestly, what is there to her, really, except a shell of who she once was?

Today I am overly critical of who I used to be, and yet perhaps the only reason why I am not as critical of who I am now is because there is no substance to my identity. Malleable to everyone, including myself, I have time and again distorted myself, reduced myself into this people-pleasing cardboard cutout, forever the mediator, never the provoker, and every act I make, in suppressed whispers, screams validate me, pay attention to me, love me, from the occasional giggle in the Chemistry classroom meant to convey a mind littered with mystique and scattered thoughts when all there is is a hollow, deprived void I am trying to shelter from external view, to excessive fixation on the way I walk on the streets of Cheltenham because the glowing heat of strangers’ judgment is an illusion I project onto myself.

Beyond all the pretenses, I am simply the one staring blankly into space as I recite, in my head, my answer to a simple question because I just have to be profound and sophisticated and interesting; I am the one burying myself in the covers way before bedtime, futilely clutching onto the hopes that my dreams will engulf me permanently, declaring myself too ‘mentally exhausted’ to do any work. I am the cake that is left when the icing crumbles, barren and molding; beyond the high-pitched, cheerful greeting I issue as default, self-deprecation laces my thoughts and words, escaping in fragments of awkwardness when I get too delusionally comfortable. Then ensues the regret of non-performatism, and occasionally I head to the piano to bash the keyboard, every resonant note reverberating through the cracks of my skull because I crave the concrete acknowledgment of my emotions; I need to be dramatic because that is the self-validation of my feelings when all else fails me.

Tomorrow, I know that I am going to wake up, and I am going to curl my hair and put on mascara and lip gloss and stare at myself in the mirror, and go to school and say the same radiant hellos to friends, but I also know that I am going to be a little bit less concerned with the appearance of my gait, and I am going to be listening to Taylor Swift unapologetically as I walk. I can afford to be this much indifferent, in this world where every relationship feels blatantly transactional and successes are founded upon external judgment. Starting from tomorrow, I am enforcing some structure in my life. There we go.