I deeply hate the word selfish, I've heard the word yelled at me since childhood. While I never thought I embodied the word, it haunts me as it was and still remains the most constant descriptor used when describing me. It runs deeper than a word because the person who hurled it at me most was supposed to be the one to uplift me, my mother. But, I couldn’t bring myself to hate her, how could I? I idolized her. So instead, I strived for an unrealistic ideation of perfection, and for a while, I thought it was working. But any mistake I made was always traced back to the root; selfishness. Numbness spread through all of my limbs, I rejected this image placed upon me. I was a leader, a creative, a humanitarian in everyone else’s eyes, so how could selfishness be all that my mother saw in me? When will I ever be free of this torment called selfishness, if ever...
