When people ask me what my biggest fear is, I say ‘spiders’ because it’s the easy answer. People nod understandingly and move on. It is such a common fear that no one thinks twice about it. That statement itself is what I see as a personal attack on my authenticity.
The society talks so much about loss of authenticity yet shames those who do display honest versions of themselves, demanding that everyone fits the criteria, follows the guidelines and act their parts out accordingly. Are our lives written for us or are we the authors to our own story?
I tell myself it all started with a boy, then it was the chess game, then the toil of being a student. But before all that, there was a piano.
At twelve years old, I was not a child; I was a Grade 8 Piano Distinction holder. The gloss of the keys and the ache from a back held perfectly straight are still ingrained in my memory. I started at five years old as a girl who played because she yearned to, but by twelve, I played for the pride reflected in my parents’ faces. The piano bench was the first place I learned how to bury the girl who wanted to read in favour of the girl who could win.
During quiet moments now, I find myself scrolling through to the start of my camera roll.
2022. The year I learned that love was given to those who are perfect. I scroll back to a video of my recording, one of the few perfect takes I managed to capture. If you zoom in to her shaking hands on the keys, they look so small but were still forced to carry the crushing weight of a legacy. I wish I could tell her that the Distinction is essentially just a piece of paper, but the person she is burying to get it? She is irreplaceable.
2023. The year where I learned how envy and infatuation could in fact, be cut from the same cloth. There was a boy who got the roles I wanted and played with a fluency I could never replicate. He was without a doubt, the better pianist, one who moved with effortless grace while I was stiff with the effort of my own forced perfection. I wanted to surpass him, take my spotlight back, but somewhere between all the crescendos of my efforts, I fell for him instead. In every photo of that time, she is practically a ghost. There is an obvious shift in the moment she started editing herself, turning down her ambition so she wouldn’t outshine the person she wanted to notice her. Her laughs cut short, her clothes darken, and her spark decrescendos to a low hum. This girl traded her competitive fire for a soft glow, hoping that if she wasn’t his rival, she might become his choice. The inside of her cheek was bitten raw as she swallowed her pride, only to be met with a rejection that stung worse than any trophies lost. She never realised that by shrinking herself to fit into his shadow, she was becoming a stranger to the girl who once played to win.
2024. Then the colours sharpen. The photos become more ‘cool’ and highly contrasted. This was the year she decided that if she couldn’t be loved for being herself, she would be feared for being someone else. In the centre of every group, she used her friends like chess pieces. She positioned them to make herself look formidable as the queen of the board. In the photos, her satin dress caught the light like silver but if you looked at her feet, they were balancing on the debris of bridges she burned to get there. This performance of power was actually just a highly protected lie. She built a throne using burned bridges. She was the Queen of the board, but she was playing the game alone.
2025. The scrolling slows once again. Those ‘cool’ photos have vanished, replaced by the blue light reality of 3.00am studies. This was the year that she finally learnt she couldn’t perform her way out of the truth. There was a terrifying honesty in quadratic formulas, it was indifferent to her charisma and remained unmoved despite her tears. The burnout wasn’t just from the workload; it was the exhaustion of having no masks left to hide behind. When the ‘A’ finally appeared, it wasn’t a trophy to be showcased to the world and prove my worth. It was a quiet moment of victory for myself and the first time I actually dared to perform for an audience of one, myself.
2026. I stop scrolling. I study those four versions of me, the prodigy, the ghost, the queen, and the student. I realise they were all just different ways of trying to hide. I was so busy learning how to be ‘something’ that I forgot how to just ‘be’.
When I turn off the phone and my room goes dim, I see my reflection. Of course, I still hesitate before admitting a mistake, still hold back my laughter, still have a calculating mindset and still carry the stress of being a student. I just see…me. Tired, unpolished but I think I am pretty proud of who I am now, I am no longer so scared to express myself and just a little happier.
So when people ask me what my biggest fear is, I say spiders – because how am I meant to explain that my camera roll, filled with the raw truth of my journey to get where I am today, is what I truly fear. It aged alongside me, across times where I suffered loss of authenticity, reminds me of the times I was too afraid to be myself and killed parts of me that I thought the world would never accept.
