I do my best to explain myself, to express the reality of how I see the world, how I live my life, how I relate to others, how I react to tragedy or blessings. But I feel something is always missing, something that conveys the uniqueness of who I am. Something always gets left on the cutting room floor.
People know for example that I'm a vegetarian. But do they understand why I'm a vegetarian, why I'm so horrified by abattoirs, why I hate the mass slaughter of animals, why I loathe the sight of a butcher chopping a carcass? No, they don't, because I have no way of conveying the depth of emotion and antipathy and incomprehension that's involved. I can't express more than a tiny sliver of what's actually going through my mind.
And so it is for everything else that makes up my particular identity. It's like the layers of an onion. People see the top layer and they think that's what I am, but they don't see all the layers underneath, going right down to the core of my being. How on earth do I explain all those other layers, the bits that can't be seen but are all parts of me? It's frustrating and perplexing.
So most of the time I just give up. I decide there's no point in trying to explain the complexities of the real me. It would take too long, I don't have the words, and everyone would lose interest long before I'm anywhere near finished.
So I just reconcile myself to the fact that people don't understand me properly, they never will, and there are always going to be a thousand false images of me in circulation, bearing as much relation to the true me as a plot summary to a 600-page novel.
A novel that may not be worth reading anyway....
