Who am I? My mind reiterates this question time and again and I travel back to days long lost to make sense of my identity, my being, my life.

When I was 6 years old, my mother brought home a DVD of an infamous movie named the Sound of Music – the cover caught my attention. A woman in her early adulthood with the biggest smile on her face having the time of her life in the most beautiful of places. I don’t know what made me happy- the smile on the woman’s face or the beautiful hills that formed the backdrop of that picture. Now I know that it was the former. The latter merely complemented the joy and exuberance of this woman. I would go on to know her name years later while watching Princess Diaries. You might be thinking why I am rambling on about Julie Andrews and movies I watched growing up- wasn’t this supposed to be about who I am? Well, it still is. Consider this to be my epilogue to what is going to be a long journey of finding myself.

Well that being said, let me pan the camera back to why I mention the Sound of Music. This movie featured a song that I learnt well before watching this movie – firstly from my mother and then gradually at school. The song went –

Do, a deer, a female deer

Re, a drop of golden sun

Mi, a name I call myself

Fa, a long long way to run…

And so on and so forth. However, I got to know how the song starts only upon being introduced to this movie. Julie Andrews’ character takes the Von Trapp children to the very hill she used to run to from the church and finds out that the children were unaware of the music notes and therefore begins this song to teach them the same. She starts the song with the following lyrics:

Let’s start from the very beginning,

a very good place to start.

When you read you begin with A-B-C.

When you sing you begin with do-re-mi.

Now this is where my monologue about the Sound of Music- might make sense to you. Everything we learn in this life has a definitive starting point – a definite structure to it. We know where our alphabets begin, our numbers begin ( at least what we are taught in our initial years, integers are a whole different can of worms), our education, our life – all very structured. The one thing to which no one has an answer to is, where do I begin? And I don’t mean to say this in the context that a speaker cannot find a definitive starting point while narrating a story. What I mean instead is, at what point or when do I become my own person- an amalgamation of my thoughts, ideas, morals, ethics etc etc etc and not the reflection of what my parents or friends or lover or haters or the society think I should be? Or who they think I am?

Hence the question with which I started- Who am I? Am I my own person yet or am I still what people say and think who I am? When does one become their own person – is it when they finally take control of what happens in their life or does it happen within us before it takes fruition in the materialistic world? I write this blog to make sense of myself and hoping someone might find answers to similar questions that come to them at night.

In my mind, I am not my person yet. A part of me is independent – and I know that part of me well— but not well enough. It’s still in the making- I am breaking and building it up again. I am marvelling at the beauty of what I have become. I am hating a few parts of it and trying to change it or accept it- trying to be comfortable in my skin. But there is another part of me- the part that makes me question myself. The part that makes me ask the same question again and again- and to make some sense of all my midnight musings- I take it to this blog!

For now, I am just a girl trying to find a place in the world ❤

P.S.- I hope you people don’t get bored of some very obvious Taylor Swift references!