Where did I go?

When we are growing up, we fall into the trap of building an identity. We create a mask or a series of masks and learn to keep ourselves sheltered. Over time, we keep checking our reflection and all we see is the mask so we forgot we ever put one on in the first place, believing the character we created is truly ourselves. Who are you really? What do you really want? When you answer these questions through the glasses of the mask/character, we get answers like "I want to be rich" or "I am a loser", answers that attach to the identity we created. We learned that people value rich people, so that is why we want to be rich or we learned that we are a loser because nobody wanted to be friends with us, we traded who we were for somebody that was more palatable for other people. It is time to stop playing the character and start living as authentically as we can bare.