There are days when discouragement sneaks in from behind. It creeps all stealthily and I am knocked down before I even know the blow occurred. Sometimes I can sense it coming, the way I start to forget myself and seek my identity in the approval I can read in your eyes. My laugh gets louder, my voice more shrill, NOTICE ME. Tell me WHO I AM. This is what happens when an introvert gets turned inside out. Sometimes we sense your feelings more than our own, and I am sure my name is failure, broken, weak. It would seem I have forgotten my very own name.

There is so many things to do when this starts to happen, turn on the tv, the computer, scroll instagram. There is a prescription made for it I am sure, or you can buy something under the counter that works like the anaesthetic you are craving.

OR.

You can remind yourself of the a name that is yours alone. The one on the palm, in the book. The one that you can hear in the tops of the pine trees, the babble of the brook, the cry of your infant, the song of the meadow lark. The one that sounds like overcomer, not defeat. Loved. Small. Free. Alive. Confident.

Your identity can never exist in something as corruptible as the mind of another. 

I’ll be out today, remembering my real name.