This is what it is and I have come to accept that. When I was younger, it was a bit difficult to really describe who I was or am and what I am all about.

I can get quite wrapped up in my books and in make-believe Worlds that open up for me in the pages and I find beautiful contentment from that.

Being around lots of people gives me pleasure and I would be the life of the party. Mingling, laughing, dancing and all the merry-making, yet in the background of all this, is some still brook that runs deep inside me. A reserved person looking from the outside.

This different personalities that inhabited one soul, confused me a bit in the younger years of still trying to find myself. I thought that I had to fit into a mold.

That I had to be x or y, black or white, this or that. That I had to be either an extrovert or introvert and every other label that people put out there to pen everyone else.

My mother would say that I was the most quiet child she has when we were growing up, with an acute sense of responsibility, yet at the same time, she would equally say that I am one person that would arrive and would be welcomed as many. ‘When she comes in, we say you people are welcome.’ A one woman riot squad.

In the early days, I never quite understood these things and struggled to fit into one caption or the other.

Now, I am older and wiser, I embrace the me who is a bundle of eclectic this and that and I have ceased with the defining.

I accept and love the me who rages like a wild-fire yet burns in peaceful flames.

The cool sophisticated lady with the blend of a gypsy, wild child.

I admire the me who loves colours in splashes of vivid brightness and the calmness of cool pastels. Who has a myriad taste, yet particular.  A me who reads like an open book, yet with curling smokes of mystery.

This is me who loves noise and quiet, who embraces life with zest and calmness. A bundle of contradicting this and that.

No more definitions!

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

Today’s SOC’s prompt asking us to write about this and that had me looking around for a few minutes then I realized that I am an epitome of lots of this and that.