I Know Who You Are

by Alice Feeney

Not everybody wants to be somebody. Some people just want to be somebody else.

I remind myself that my name only defines me if I allow it to.

Sometimes I long to rearrange those letters into something else. Someone else. A new name for a new me. The me I became when nobody else was looking.

Sometimes it’s the people who love us the most that hurt us the hardest; because they can.

Ever since I was a child, I have preferred to inhabit the fictional lives of others, hiding in stories that have happier endings than my own; we are what we read.

The lies we tell ourselves are always the most dangerous.

We weren’t always the version of us that we became. Life remodels relationships like the sea reshapes the sand; eroding dunes of love, building banks of hate.

Not everybody wants to be somebody. Some people just want to be somebody else.

Acting is easy; it’s being me that I find difficult.

I’ve never felt so trapped by my own wrong turns.

I built my prison in the way that people often do, with solid walls made from bricks of guilt and obligation.

A bird never chooses its own cage.

Sorry is easier to say than it is to feel. Even easier to write.

Denial is the most destructive form of self-harm.

I wonder where other people go when they turn off the lights at night. Do they all drift and dream? Or are there some, like me, who wander somewhere dark and cold within themselves, digging around inside the shadows of their blackest thoughts and fears, clawing away at the dirt of memories they wish they could forget? Hoping nobody else can see the place they have sunk down into?

I’ve never been a fan of improvisation; I prefer my life to be scripted, planned, and neatly plotted.

because I love us more than I hate him,

Papering over the cracks doesn’t mean they’re not there, but life is prettier when you do.

It felt so right. We had a connection I could neither fathom nor explain, and we slotted together as though we were meant to be that way.

Ignorance isn’t bliss; it’s fear postponed to a later date.

Sometimes we pretend not to understand things that we do.

A marriage starved of affection leaves an emaciated love behind; one that is frail, easy to bend and break.

I can’t always speak the truth; my inability to trust people won’t allow it.

It’s like a parent dropping a child who is scared of water into the deep end, presuming that the child will swim, not sink. One of these days I know I’m going to drown.

I seem to have spent my life doing things I don’t want to.

We exchange the currency of our dreams for a reality funded by acceptance as we get older.

Hiding the truth from ourselves is a similar game to hiding it from others, it just comes with a stricter set of rules.

We all make daily decisions about which secrets to decant, and which to keep for a later date, when they might taste better on our tongues.

Sometimes it only takes one person to believe in you to change your life forever. Sometimes it only takes one person not believing in you to destroy it. Humans are a highly sensitive species.

We are all conditioned and fine-tuned to our own unique brand of normal; we wear it like a fingerprint. We’re taught to fit in with others and learn what is expected of us from the moment we are born. Everything we ever do is an act.

You can’t allow the past to steal your present, but if you siphon off just the right amount, it can help fuel your future.

I’ve always felt safe in bookshops. It’s as though the stories inside them can rescue me from myself and the rest of the world.

You should always fight, especially when you think you are going to lose. That’s when you should fight the hardest.

Books can be mirrors, too, offering a reflection of our worst selves for appraisal; lessons tucked between pages, just waiting to be learned.

We’ve all got so busy staring down at our screens that we’ve forgotten to look up at the stars.

I think it can be dangerous to spend too long watching the lives of others; you might run out of time to live your own.

Technology is devolving the human race. Eating up our emotional intelligence, spitting out any remnants of ...

The world will keep on spinning and the stars will always shine, regardless of wh...

Each walking, talking, thinking, feeling human star has its own planets revolving around it: parents, children, friends, lovers. Sometimes stars get too big, too hot, too dangerous, and the planets closest to them burn to oblivion.

We are all just stars trying to shine in the darkness.

People say we can be anyone we want to be in life. That’s a lie. The truth is, we can be anyone we believe we can be. There’s a big difference.

Destroy the belief, destroy the reality it gave birth to.

Unpleasant rumors are like leeches: they stick.

Faced with the option to sink or swim, I choose survival. Every. Single. Time. I’ll teach myself to breathe underwater if I have to.

We are all capable of the most fantastical fiction in the aid of self-preservation. A shield of lies can protect from the toughest of truths.

sometimes the advice we give ourselves is the hardest to hear.

When you dig down, deep enough inside your own despair, you usually meet the you that you used to be,

I’m starting to think that life is little more than a series of doors: every day we have to choose which ones to open, which to walk through, and which to close behind us, leaving them forever locked.

Sometimes you have to fall hard enough for it to hurt, to know when to pick yourself up. You can’t start to put yourself back together if you don’t even know that you’re broken.

Your past only owns you if you allow it to.