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We spend our lives building an identity.
My personality. My story. My beliefs. My past.
But what if the self you've been protecting...is only a mask you've worn for so long that you've forgotten it isn't your face?
Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet and writer, once wrote that he suddenly realized he had been living through a false self. "I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now."
He described it as waking up in the middle of a bridge...and discovering that the person he thought he was had been asleep all along.
Perhaps that's why moments of deep awareness feel so unsettling. For a brief instant... the masks fall away. The roles disappear. And something quieter begins to emerge.
Not a better version of you. Not a new identity. But a deeper awareness that cannot be reduced to a name, a history, or a personality. Maybe the purpose of life isn't to become somebody.
Maybe it's to stop clinging so tightly to who we think we are. Because the moment we loosen our grip on the self...we finally become free enough to discover it.
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