Anoscetiaan-oh-see-sha or an-oh-say-tyah

n. The anxiety of not knowing "the real you." Everyone around you has a vibrant color of personality—it shines through everything they do. How strange that your own experience isn't tinted with any particular vibe. Inside, you're neutral gray reflecting whatever strong colors are nearby.

Your friends would insist you're anything but neutral—a sunny yellow or fiery red. But each person only sees you in isolated contexts. They'd be astonished to shadow you through a week, seeing you as a professional, a nervous wreck, the life of the party.

You wish you could strip your identity down through all your habits and cultural programming. But the more you look, the more it dissolves into noise.

Maybe there is no single self. Maybe you're a shifting collage of personas, each as authentic as the next. A kaleidoscope of moving fragments. You're not a finished painting, signed and sealed. If there is a "real you," it's the mess of paint on the palette: colors swirling, perpetually unfinished.