Who Am I When the World Isn’t Watching?

I believe my truest self will appear most when I’m quite alone in my room or anywhere in my apartment, walking from room to room with my cats running past between my legs, and I’m talking to them like they understand me. I would always have a coffee or some cold drink at hand and a book in the other, classic music softly playing and echoing in the hallway. I am physically at home, but my heart and mind are untethered, floating somewhere high in the clouds, looking down at the city I call home.

There is a version of me that exists when the world isn’t watching, when I don’t have to cycle through the various “selves” I play for others. If I didn’t have to perform, I think I’d actually be quite a likable, perhaps even entertaining person. I’d be more relaxed—the kind of person who leans in to really listen to your stories, whether they’re grand adventures of navigating the adulting life or just the simple, quiet details of what you made for dinner last night. Oh, we could talk for hours and hours, throats parched, hands circling in the air, and the energy of the room rising higher and higher. I had once caught up with a friend I haven’t met for years, and we prattled for five hours straight until one of us realised that it had gotten dark. It’s been a while since I talked so much, when would the next one be?

I’d probably guffaw and cackle too, unfiltered, at your jokes without a care in the world because that’s actually what my laughter sounds like. Not the controlled shrill hee-hees! of the hyenas that sometimes escape me in public occupied spaces. Have you also noticed that our laughter changes as we grow older? It’s something I observed in myself, and I wonder if you noticed it about yours. Isn’t it strange, I wonder why it happens.

If no one is watching me, which happens often, I’d also be in bed all day, scrolling through my phone, watching videos of other cats other than my own (keep this post away from them), of art and of books. I don’t stray too long on other social medias because of how toxic and repetitive they can be, but I’d stay just long enough to know what’s the latest gossip and news to help me feel updated, and then I’d move on.

I would talk to myself — a lot, just random things like politics, criticising my looks and then throwing low effort compliments into the mix for damage control, what bizarre makeup look I’d do the next time I step outside, as well as the places I’ve visited and others I haven’t been to. Of course, it has to involve me addressing the ceiling to an invisible ghost-audience or the mirror, mostly the latter, because I sometimes genuinely forget what I look like. It needs to have that TedTalk feel because I know that once I step outside these walls and back into my other roles, these ideas might never get a second chance to be spoken out loud. If I don’t speak them now, they’ll simply retreat to the back of my mind and disappear again, lost to the noise of the world.

There is a quiet power in being your own favorite conversationalist. It reminds me that even when the world is watching, the most important listener is the one who walks in my shoes.