What if?

How would you feel if you suddenly asked yourself, “Is it all just a lie?”  What if the identity, the very core of your beliefs, that you had clung to in your darkest times suddenly felt like a fantasy, a construct of your mind in a desperate, subconscious attempt to escape the world?

I want to say that deep down inside, down in the very core of my heart, there lays the spirit of a great dragon; I desperately do.  But every time I say it, every time I say “I am the dragon within,” I feel that it is a lie—a lie not only to those who hear it, but a lie to myself.

Lies.  That’s all I had come to know in high school.  I had to lie to my parents to hide my true self.  I had to lie to my friends to tell them I was okay even when I was not.  I did not want them to see the pain deep within—the storm that raged not only in my head, but my heart as well.

Now, I feel as though I am lying again.  All these lies, they destroy me from the inside out.  I no longer feel whole.  I no longer feel.  There is a hole deep inside me, a hole where that dragon lived.  He—I have abandoned myself.  I have cut out my own heart and left the rest of me to just wither and die.  I feel like an empty husk now.  I cannot stop these lies, yet it is the lies that are tearing me apart.

I don’t have the strength to tell anyone the truth.  I don’t have the strength to stand proud.  I… I can’t find the strength.

I cannot stop asking myself “What if?”  What if everything I had come to believe with all my heart and all my resolution is just a lie?  What if the very core beliefs that kept me alive in my darkest times are just a fantasy?  What if I really am one of the few ‘posers’ that merely claim to be draconic?

I keep telling myself I am the dragon within, but there is a part of me that refuses to believe; there is a part of me that refuses to accept.  It is destroying me.  It is… it is disheartening.  I am tormented by my own doubts.  I am tormented by that question, “What if?”

Ask yourself that question, “What if?”  Ask yourself.