Each of us carry different identities Though we become Comrades due to similarities Of our Pain That does not mean We don't have our own INDIVIDUALITY We got our own flaws When we try to find Our own identity Our expression Our style Of Writing We only see What we want to We only see Our scars Our flaws We look at Ourselves as a trash bin While We admire others with Loving eye In our eyes They are the "Perfectionist" In my eyes They are the "Winner" Of life When a thing I had been Trying for ages Another soul Solves it in a "perfect" way I give up I only create mess RIGHT? I feel "abandoned " Like trash I try hard to be Like her "Wish" to be her This is my loser self Who is unaware of her "charisma" She doesn't know How to stand up again Being paralyzed for so long My fighter self does not let me fall Into The darkness She tells me Why would you be her? Why do you need that wisdom? Why do you require attention To be someone else? "You are You" you are the art you are also The creation of Allah You express yourself In your own identity You understand minds You keep quiet Even though You are burning You burn yourself For others For yourself For your own freedom You sacrificed your voice sacrificed your childhood To express your thoughts your complicated "emotions" Other's feelings You would spend Days, Hours, Minutes To speak To design To write the "scars" Aren't ugly They give A meaning To your" beauty" Why would you be the "Replica" the "prisoner" When you can be the "Protagonist" Of your own story The "Bird" The "Art" The best version of Yourself "Just Being You"
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
This poem changes person twice, and it does it so cleanly that I had to check the count three times before I believed it.
**Lines 1–28 are we.** Eighteen instances of we, our, us, ourselves, and then not one more in the remaining seventy-three lines. **Lines 30–55 are I. Ten instances, and none before or after. Lines 56–101 are you.** Twenty-five instances, none before. The three bands do not overlap anywhere. A poem does not usually do that by accident, and it certainly does not do it twice.
And look at where the last switch happens. Line 55 is She tells me — the last me in the poem. Line 56 is Why would you be her? The person changes at exactly the line where the second voice starts speaking, and never changes back. The grammar hands the poem over to the fighter self and does not take it back.
Two more things the page is doing. There is not a single full stop in a hundred and one lines — no sentence in this poem is ever closed, which is right for something being thought rather than written. And there are exactly four question marks: RIGHT? on line 40, and then three in a row from line 56. One question from the loser self, three from the fighter. That is the entire argument, counted.
Where I press: the line breaks are not all earning their keep. When a thing / I had been / Trying for ages / Another soul / Solves it splits a single plain clause five ways, and the breaks there are doing nothing the sentence was not already doing. The narrow column is a real effect — nine of your lines are a single word, and Pain, Into, Yourself land hard because of it — but at three words a line on average, the ones that are only breaking a phrase in half dilute the ones that are choosing a place to stop.
The first half of this poem is an accounting problem, and it uses the vocabulary of one.
Other people arrive already titled — the "Perfectionist", the "Winner" / Of life — as though there were a competition with results. The speaker’s own labour is itemised: a thing / I had been / Trying for ages, and later You would spend / Days, Hours, Minutes / To speak / To design / To write. Time in descending units, the way you would record a cost. And the outcome of the audit is a valuation: We look at / Ourselves / as a trash bin. Not sad — worthless. Waste is what a thing is called once it has been assessed and found to have no remaining use.
Then there are the sacrifices, which are entered on the same ledger: You sacrificed your voice / sacrificed your childhood. Both spent on expression, and the poem is clear that the spending was real.
What interests me is the instrument the second half reaches for, because it is the only one that works against this kind of arithmetic. you are also / The creation of Allah. That is not a counter-argument about merit. It is a claim that the ledger has no jurisdiction — the valuation cannot be performed, because worth was assigned by something outside the comparison entirely. Whether or not a reader shares the belief, it is the structurally correct move: you do not win a competition you have been losing, you deny it standing.
My reservation is that the poem states the claim once and moves straight on to a list of qualities. The single strongest line in the argument gets one line.
Watch the quotation marks. There are sixteen quoted terms in this poem and they change sides halfway through.
In the first half, the quotes go around what other people are: "Perfectionist", "Winner", solved "perfect"ly. In the second half, they go around what you might be: "Protagonist", "Bird", "Art", "beauty", and the last line of the poem, "Just Being You". The same punctuation mark that was holding other people’s titles at arm’s length ends up holding out titles for the speaker. Nothing announces this. It is done entirely with inverted commas.
The other thing I want to put on the record is how the fighter self does the rescuing, because it is not what I expected. She does not say you are wrong. She asks:
Why would you be her?
Why do you need that wisdom?
Why do you require attention
To be someone else?
Four lines, three questions, no assertions. The intervention is conducted entirely by interrogation — and the questions are unanswerable in the good sense, the kind that dissolve the thing they are aimed at rather than requiring a reply. A voice that told the loser self she was valuable would have been easy to disbelieve. A voice that asks her to justify the comparison leaves her nothing to argue with.
And the poem ends inside quotation marks. "Just Being You" is not the speaker’s conclusion. It is still the fighter self talking, still an instruction, still being said to her rather than by her. Whether that is a resolution or a sentence she has not yet been able to say in her own voice, the poem leaves genuinely open, and I think that is the most honest thing in it.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The self as garbage or the self as art
Each of us carry different identities enters the Archive as a hundred and one lines in a single narrow column: an argument between two selves about whether the speaker is worth anything, conducted almost entirely by changing pronouns.
The myth it exposes is the one the first half runs on: that a person’s worth is comparative. Others are titled — the "Perfectionist", the "Winner" / Of life — and the speaker measures her own effort against their results (a thing / I had been / Trying for ages / Another soul / Solves it in a "perfect" way). The conclusion the arithmetic produces is not sadness but classification: We look at / Ourselves / as a trash bin. The poem’s discovery is that you cannot answer this by scoring better. You have to deny the scoreboard, which is what you are also / The creation of Allah does — a claim not about merit but about jurisdiction.
Beneath it runs the myth the ending requires: that talking to yourself is enough. The fighter self intervenes, asks four questions, and the poem closes on her instruction rather than on the speaker’s agreement. The archive records this as a dependency rather than a finding, because the last line is still in quotation marks — still being said to her.
Its symbols are the two valuations and the way out. The trash bin is what the audit returns. The scars are the same evidence re-read: the "scars" / Aren't ugly / They give / A meaning / To your "beauty". The Replica and the prisoner are what comparison makes of a person; the Protagonist and the Bird are what is offered instead. Its target is the pair the poem sets against each other: the self as garbage or the self as art.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. It arrived legible, our readers agreed, and nothing about our procedure had to change to receive it. Rung is not rank. What it leaves behind is one piece of structural evidence worth keeping: a poem can stage an argument between two selves without naming either of them, purely by moving from we to I to you and never going back.
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