“At the risk of sounding narcissistic – the difference is me.”

That is how I started my personal statement when I was applying to transfer universities last year. At a time when everything in my life felt “not right” and I felt alien within every setting, I found myself trying to sum up my complex identity, one that I didn’t quite understand myself, onto a mere two-page essay.

Change has always been the central theme of my life, with me as the constant anchor. In my childhood, whenever the blankets and barbies didn’t drown out the voices of my quarrelling parents, art and music muted the trauma and filled my head with big dreams. My diary gave me a home whenever I didn’t have one outside its pages.

I grew up in Malleswaram, a little suburb in Bangalore, India. My weeks were filled with homework and distractions while my weekends were filled with laughter and raised voices in my grandmother’s house. No matter what chaos seemed to transpire in the external, I let canvases, colors and movement express the words and stories I could never verbally convey.

The safety net I built for myself had made me a clear and decisive person who knew exactly who she was and what she wanted from life. When the big dreams that lived in my head turned into reality and my family and I relocated to America, everything around me felt brighter and more colorful. I envisioned a paradise where nothing could go wrong, a new fresh slate where I could be someone new. For a while, my excitement blinded every imperfection.

But I had forgotten to account for those sixteen years that had been my foundation. Eventually, those imperfections became polite smiles in rooms of unfamiliar laughter and feelings of isolation every time someone asked me to repeat something. I was a fish out of water and the unnaturalness of it appeared in every sense. It was in the way it built layers of doubt in theater class or when someone mentioned Kermit the Frog or Charlie Brown, and my simple question followed. “Who?”

The girl who had Selena Gomez and Billy Joel in her Spotify Wrapped even before she moved to America, now constantly listened to her past’s familiar tunes – tunes that she could take refuge in. The small world that was once the cocoon of certainty was now the Triwizard Tournament’s maze from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” by J. K. Rowling with no red flares to spare.

My music had become both a comfort and a trap that kept me stuck in a period of nostalgia – time that would never come back. Every trip back to India kept reminding me that the version I was holding onto no longer existed.

The realization had set in. I would never be in my grandmother’s house every Sunday having her signature coffee; I would never walk back home from dance class as the sun set; I would never listen to the sound of traffic and daydream in the backseat of my mom’s Maruti 800; I would never be sitting in the same octagon-shaped living room with my mom and sister talking, bickering and laughing.

Every time the seasons changed and the jackets got thicker, isolation became my friend. Every spring when the flowers started to bloom, I, too, came out of my mental cave.

Skip forward to freshman year of college, when having free time started to become a luxury. The desire to be everyone and do everything all at once drove my actions. I did become everyone and did everything, but when I finally had a pause after the year ended, I couldn’t find the sense of purpose that I had started with. It seemed to me that I was chasing a goal I could not see. My clear lens in the face of every past hardship had seemed to be covered by a blurry, thick fog that I had not seen coming.

It was the summer I was turning 20, turning old. Okay, maybe not too old, but the jump from 19 to 20 seemed like a huge gap. It was a shift from when mistakes seemed natural to when mistakes came with costs attached to them (like most things in one’s adult life). I realized that I suddenly did not know who I was or what I wanted from life. My external uncertainties seemed insignificant in the face of my internal uncertainties.

The dichotomy of my identity that I had been ignoring pressed, rather rudely, for attention. I lived in two worlds. The first was in my blood and harbored my roots; the other allowed me to grow far beyond my imagination but lacked my grandmother’s coffee and the octagon-shaped living room. The India I once knew no longer existed, and the America I now live in felt too alien. My existence appears to be somewhere in between both worlds.

Getting comfortable with this unfamiliar cloud of uncertainty is a tricky thing. Every false sense of control I had seemed to disappear. This alienating feeling that I had trapped myself into had nothing to do with not being the same person I once was, but with not knowing who I wanted to be.

As I sit in my class and type this (for the purpose of maintaining a good academic standing, I won’t disclose which class), I feel a weird sense of liberty in knowing that I might never know. Knowing would be boring. It would be like reading the last page of a book first or like watching “The Great Gatsby” on Broadway knowing Gatsby’s fate (which, for the record, I didn’t – the shock on my face was a funny sight).

Maybe everything doesn’t have to be in control. There is a liberty in knowing that, although you didn’t have complete control of your life in the beginning, when you are an adult, everything’s on you. You only have control over your actions and reactions; you’re accountable only for the figure that stares back at you in the mirror.

Holding onto things seems to take up space. I am the first exhibit of this because I never seem to have storage on my devices due to the 22,000 photos that a part of me would hate to erase. I used to think, “If I let go of my past, who am I?” But then, on one fine Friday, I had enough of the phone glitches and deleted 1,048 photos in one go (but not before backing them up). I didn’t feel anything except a lingering hope that maybe one day in the future, I’ll be able to take the time to revisit them like an old friend.

My fight to conceptualize and understand everything in and around me only pushes me closer to the realization that perhaps people are not meant to be understood; they are meant to be experienced. And uncertainty is a part of that experience. It’s okay to say, “I don’t know.”