Do you know who you really are? Are you, you? Or are you someone else?

Who am I? The most under-hyped question of mankind.
We often drift through life subduing our true personalities in order to fit into a mould created by society. We go about our short life accusing each other of pulling on masks when the truth is, we all are the same. No person, however important they may be, behaves the same with everyone. We all are different around different people.
Even the most hardcore, seemingly emotionless person will have a soft corner towards someone.
Who are we really then? How do we recognize our true personality. The lines defining our masks are definitely blurry. We all have a central character, someone we wish other people perceive us as and we try to live up that..
And when DOES the mask wearing begin? when we first open our eyes? when we learn to talk? first mix with people other than family?

My point is simple..
In our ambition to be accepted or even recognized, we all pull on masks to the best of our ability in the process of which, we forget who we really are..
The rest of our life is just changing those masks over a faceless body as the need arises. We lose our true selves as soon as we are introduced to certain objectives and ideals we're supposed to live up to.

How can we change?
We can't.. If any of you remember your mental state at your time of innocence, congrats.. That is however, tougher than it seems. For as far as we can remember, values of prejudice, malice, jealously, hate and selfishness have been instilled into us.. Unwittingly by parents, teachers and even friends.

What now?
Try to have a definitive personality that does not waver? Not possible. You can however try to recognize all the influences in your life and weed out the negative ones. One of the biggest negative influences in India being that of racial prejudice.
If someone asks you to behave a particular way, take five minutes to reason with yourself if that what is being asked of you IS indeed practical. You are not sheep.
Well not all of us are anyway.

To sum things up, I'd like to say, Being yourself isn't as simple as people make it out to be. We often have to do things to appease other people, its perfectly human and natural. Just also learn to make up your own mind about things and not take someones word as the bible truth..

We should definitely learn from the experiences and mistake made by others, but sometimes that process tends to bypass the lesson you were supposed to have learnt from it..
You don't 'know' fire's hot until you've been burnt by it..