THE BORROWED SELF

jerry KWATCHEY
@kwatcheyjerry128608
2 hours ago

#poetry
THE BORROWED SELF

A Cinematic Reflection by SIMU

Most people are other people —
living echoes in borrowed flesh,
a chorus of names, beliefs, and borrowed dreams,
reciting scripts written long before their first breath.

You are born into a setting —
a language, a lineage, a lens.
Before you can even ask who you are,
the world answers for you.
And you accept,
believing the voice that raised you
must surely know the sound of truth.

So you build your life on inherited meanings,
wrap yourself in secondhand convictions,
and call it “me.”
You fight for it.
You defend it with pride,
as though the illusion itself were freedom.

But freedom has never been
the absence of chains —
it is the awareness of them.
And awareness…
is a dangerous thing to those still asleep.

So the world spins —
a masquerade of borrowed selves,
each shouting louder to drown the whisper of authenticity.
And chaos reigns not because evil thrives,
but because few ever stop to ask
who is the one behind the mask I wear?

To find yourself
is not to abandon the world,
but to unlearn it —
to strip away the layers of “should” and “must,”
until all that remains
is the quiet pulse of your own becoming.

That moment —
when silence meets self,
when reflection dissolves repetition —
is when you finally realize:
the greatest act of rebellion
is simply to be.

---