Dragged

She feels like she's always walking on someone's shadow, instead of casting her own. She wonders if she's truly chasing her own dream or if she really had any dreams at all. All those images plastered on her vision board, are those images even illustrated by her? She's writing a story, but is it her own story?

Being a perpetual people pleaser, the idea of what she wants and what people wants of her gets murkier as time goes by. This lack of clarity feels isn't going anywhere. It seems to get blurrier as she walks down the pavements that her parents carved for her. She tries to feel happy, but her happiness feels like a sporadic spark instead, which instantly gets replaced with emptiness. She feels empty, she feels nothing. 

People tell her that she should celebrate with glee. She knows that she should. But why is it that she do not feel gleeful or anything that is expected of her? It was then she realized that those are not her dreams.

She feels like a puppet doll, except that there isn't really anyone maneuvering her. She's doing it on her own, except she isn't sure if she's doing it based on her desires. What are her desires anyway? Her sister is soaring towards her dreams, designing breathtaking destinies and running wild with determinations to succeed. She listened and listened as people fuel her mind with incessant praises for her sister. Why aren't her dreams as big as hers? Why isn't she living up to her glory? Maybe she should be half as good as she is. Yet her own sister tells her that she has to be a perfect daughter and she has got to fulfill the duty she never did. She has to be free of mistakes. She's trying to hard to be the best daughter she can, so much that she feels so suffocated. She can't say what she wants. Nobody wants to listen to her voice. Nobody feels the need to. 

 She hears words like "do what makes you feel best", "write your own story", "fight for your dreams". Those words may seem resemble one another, but to her, they completely differ. 

Because what makes her feel best? What makes her happy? Is it by keeping herself contented, or by keeping her family contented. It's wildly intertwined. By keeping her family contented, does she feel contented about it? Maybe. Yet there's another voice that yells in her overwhelmed mind to write her own story. She asked herself, what's her own story? In a perfect world, she would want to go somewhere else, much further away from her family and probably do an art degree or some other degree that people will condemn with snide remarks. Then she hears another voice that tells her to fight for her dreams. Her dreams? She dreams for people to look up to her with a slight awe with the roads she travelled and the plans she achieved. She dreams to live in a hectic city life, but with utmost happiness and contentment. She dreams to be really happy to be where she is because she knows that here is exactly where she wants to be.

Where exactly does she wants to be? If only people spoke less, and listened more. Maybe she would know.

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Confusion engulfs her mind all the time. It feeds with expectations. It eats away her conscience until she feels like there's nothing left of her.