Thoughts to ponder..

To Myself by W.S. Merwin

Once, you were care-free. Always in high spirits. Overflowing with joy. Keeping a hopeful character. Then your walls come crashing down. Circumstances we never imagine happening would come knocking at our door. All that joy and happiness was stripped away. However, that builds the character of who we are going to be as an adult. The question is, Would you fall to that melancholy and not move forward or would you move forward and keep up a positive behavior despite the challenges? I choose the latter. If you chose the second option to keep reaching for your goals, you come to that feeling when you desire something that is from the past. You crave for that character you’ve had as a young child. Though the challenge is that you’ve grown up, and you’ve been prideful. You’re too egoistical to resort to how you once were because you’re ashamed of that and that people might think you’re childish. W.S. Merwin’s poem “To Myself” explains the struggles between the past and the present during that moments when we crave for that childish character within our hearts to escape from reality just for a while and be care-free.

At times, as a grown up, we tend to “forget” about who we once were, naughty child yet playful, rebellious teenager yet full of aspirations and dreams in life. Either we get too sucked up with our problems or too prideful to admit that you want to play tag, or hide-and-go-seek. We tell ourselves, ‘We live in reality. We can’t be like children anymore. We can’t be like teenagers any longer’. Even if we tell ourselves that, we “go on looking for” that child inside of us. We try to remember those exact feelings we’ve had but we are not so sure sometimes though we “believe” that we do. Because it was us. We can’t pinpoint it and it’s in the tip of our tongue but we were sure that our past self “was there a moment before”. It’s as if our past persona is “still alive” when we reminisce the way life used to be. We lose ourselves because over time we pretend to be someone who we were not. In reality, we “are still the same” but we “pretend to be time” but “we are not time”. Especially in these lines “you speak in the words but you are not what they say.” As humans, we are people pleaser so you do things because that’s what society is wanting you to do. We want to act like everyone else but we don’t realize that we forget who we truly are. In our past, we build a strong foundation and decide that this is who I’m going to be. We have it set in our minds but once you start interacting with people around you, you are somewhat ashamed of who you are.

Merwin took his poem into a third-person point of view to create this realistic person of our past so we can truly understand how our behavior is right now in the present. When we’re younger, we’re not too afraid of being true to ourselves but when you’ve grown up, you want to fit in. Then there’s a game of tug-of-war between us and the past because we have the mentality to try and fit in and not accept what we’ve been in the past. Without consideration within yourself, you will find yourself lost and that’s why we spend our time reminiscing the past as much as we could so we can linger to that hopes, dreams, and do things because it is what our heart desires and not what someone else desires. What the poem tells me overall, is that always be proud of who you are. Don’t be afraid of being different.