How well can you know a person?

Recent events in life just made me think of this simple yet intriguing question. How well, to what extent can you know a person? We are surrounded by people, some who means a lot, and then there are acquaintances. We set this classification on the basis of love we have for them and by analyzing how much we know them. We stay under a roof, and call the people under the same roof as family. We believe that we know them, we understand them. But at the end of the day, do we really know their inner devils? Do we really know these people that we stick around with? We don’t. At least that’s what I have learnt by the course of time.

If we don’t know them at all, how can we differentiate between a stranger and a loved one? I don’t know, not yet.

I am a person who write when I am emotionally overwhelmed. That can run both the way round. Overwhelmed with exquisite and joyful feelings as well as the kind of feelings that can make me sick to the pit of my stomach. I have my own ups and downs. And I pour them out as words. I write these in pages that only I can read. Only I can access. But strangely I find myself untrue to even the most private pages that I possess. I keep things selfishly to myself, I hold things back from the truest of my companion. My diary. I consider it as a person and it so happens that I withhold information about myself from those pages. I don’t lie, I just chuck the part of sharing everything. Sometimes my truest fears remain unwritten and all I store is happy memories. The good part in me. The evil that seethes remains buried under my skin. Writing things down makes them more real than they appear to be. At times this is what holds me back. I don’t want to admit to myself, those fears that I hold beneath. So I prefer burying it down.

The underlying point being that, if a person cannot be true to themselves, if a person remains behind a mask even in front of a mirror, how can we possibly decipher them? Every morning we wake up and groom ourselves for the day, unintentionally, without our knowledge, we are choosing a mask to wear. A mask that will make us all the things the others want us to be. We turn ourselves to fit into the surrounding and camouflage our demons. Shut them out for a while and live through the day. I won’t call it living, it is rather the primal instinct of survival that makes us wear this mask. We go around people telling them what they want to hear and in turn they tell us what we want to hear. So where is truth or knowing each other at all?

It’s all part of a role play. At the end of the day, we don’t know them, they don’t know us. We are all strangers. Strangers who believe that they are soul mates, best friends and a lot more. We know people only to the point they want us to know them. We share a relationship of decades, still we have got points to argue and put up a drama on. And then the demon rises, up from the tomb. Causing deterioration in what we held precious for a long time. It is because at some point in life, when the demon had to be acknowledged, we wore a mask, suppressed it into oblivion. We might have won the battle at that point, but the same battle rises again, again and again for the evil remains unaddressed.

Evil doesn’t always have a bad connotation. It all depends on how you perceive it. It can be your fears, your flaws, your lack of understanding, and also your ignorance. At the right point at the right time, these evils should be dealt with. With lots of care, love and understanding. It is not a force from the outside, it’s just you that you have to face. That confrontation can break you or make you. It all depends on how you go about handling yourself at the needy times.

When we hide from our flaws, fears and yell on people who are trying to help us face them, we are burying our truest self. We are murdering the possibility of a peaceful day in the future that can be lived without wearing a mask. When we can look into the mirror and contemplate what we see, when we need not seek ways to improve the sight before us. It will come to a point when we start having a peaceful mind, a better relationship where monosyllables do not take the place of a proper conversation. We seek love and write poems about it, when all the love you need for yourself lies just beneath. But it lies in the clutches of that sleeping giant that may wake to your slightest provocations. It needs to be loved, rectified and well taken care of. A person who doesn’t love himself can never spread any form of affection to anyone. If you live in self-loathing or in a world where you think only you are right, then bid goodbye to love, for you’ll never find it.

If you cannot give, don’t expect it in return either. It all comes from acceptance, acceptance of the evils and the angels that live in your heart. Being true to yourself can be the first step towards being true to others. The big array of masks that have been worn by you, may not always help keep the stealth mode on. How well can you know someone else depends on how well you try to know yourself. The stranger within you holds more power than you imagine it to. Unleashing the stranger is not enough, you need to accept who you are, and then we can say that at least you know yourself, if not the others.