I’ve always been someone
Rather inconspicuous
Rather ordinary,
Terribly awkward about everything
And awfully clumsy

Yet I’ve found myself in severe arguments
Willing and unwilling repartees,
Thrillingly innocent adventures
Brimming with anomalies

There is an unrest within
A proclivity for annoyance,
A desire to be anonymous
While indulging in flamboyance

They call it individuality
A vanilla curiously original,
Without elegance or intricacies
Yet standing out in the peripheral

I am standing in my shoes
But uncomfortably wear my skin,
Perhaps it’s all the eyes on me
That I wish I wouldn’t imagine

My irrepressible inner conspiracy theorist
Shudders in irreverent timidity,
Wanting to minify my presence
While standing with enforced equanimity

There is a tug of war
And I am balanced precariously,
The rope is taut, pulled on either ends
By paradoxical ideologies

I am very present in every thought
And absent from reality,
Thusly standing in the shoes of the self-involved
Quietly convinced of a self-aware personality

– Akanksha Gupta