simple

and when i suddenly no longer was what i had been before; when everything i had learnt to hold as my own, as myself, was no longer there - how could i have not been shaken by it?

i had been given these attributes, these characteristics and traits and colours, all these things - things i hadn't asked for, and at the time wasn't even sure if i should welcome or not. but then i got used to them, and i have to say i grew to like some of them as well - they were, after all, things i previously hadn't possessed, mostly good things, and maybe i was vain, and i wanted to think that i indeed was the way those things put me out to be.  

but then they were taken away, just like that. as sudden and as unexpectedly as they had been planted on me, as quickly they were gone; only now i knew of them, i knew the pleasure they brought along; and i felt pain over losing them. even as they were never really there, and yet i felt a sense of loss; this genuinely surprised me. was it so then that i had became, or had wanted to become, all those things; and when i no longer was considered a representation of them, i had indeed lost something? or did i merely long for the recognition - was i still those things even if wasn't viewed in the light cast by them any more? and if that was the case, wasn't it then so that the loss wasn't mine at all? and if i wasn't those things, well, in that case i had never been, and the only thing gone was something that hadn't been mine to keep or lose in the first place.

and that's when i realized something fundamental - that it didn't matter at all, and that i shouldn't be sad. either i was those things, or i had became them, or i never had been. either the recognition was outside myself, in which case it was beyond my control; or then the recognition was in me, and it could never be taken away.