Personal Essay: If I Were a Building

Hey y'all, I hope that everyone is doing great! This is a short personal essay that I wrote about insecurities and changes. This is a topic that is really personal for me but one that I know many people can relate to. I hope that you will find this piece inspiring and, as always, thank you so much for reading.

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If I were a building, I wouldn’t be one that people gaze at. I would not be a skyscraper, part of an impressive skyline that amazes in the light and dazzles in the dark. I would not be an art museum which people see and are immediately inspired by its beauty and the treasures that it holds. I would not be a world famous tourist attraction whose uniqueness makes it brilliant. No, if I were a building, I wouldn’t be one that people gaze at. If I were a building, I’d be an abandoned one. Abandoned by others, abandoned by me.

According to the dictionary, abandoned is defined as “left without needed protection or care.” What type of protection or care do people really need? I think it’s that feeling of love, that feeling of being wanted and desired. All my life I have needed to be loved, needed to be looked at so that I knew I was appreciated. Needed to feel like I wasn’t so abandoned. Somewhere along the way, this need for company left me feeling more alone than I could have ever imagined.  

I started out as a building with people I knew and adored, a small one, just a house. The thing about houses, however, was that not everyone could appreciate a house. Some people didn’t like my tan wooden sidings or my white door or the bright twinkling sound of my doorbell. So I changed, just a little, just enough so that people could like me more, so that they’d want to move in. I painted some of my sidings red, because people like red and I knew that. I hung a wreath of daisies on my door, even though I have allergies, because people like daisies and I knew that. Then I changed my doorbell into one of those cheesy doorbell songs that everyone has, but I didn’t like that sound at all, and I knew that. I dealt with it though, because more people came and for a while I felt appreciated, treasured, complete.

Even so, I wanted to grow bigger, taller, to attract a larger crowd, so I changed. I added layers, each one more different and more artificial so that I could be appreciated by everyone. I noticed one day, that my house had been crushed by my added layers. I had become an apartment. People came, but people also moved out. They left their furniture, their stories, and their memories. They left me too, and I couldn’t stand it.

I needed them to stay, to feel like I was the reason that nomadic people could finally settle down. So I became a hotel. I sliced myself into rooms and halls and redecorated. One of my halls was brightly lit with orange shag carpeting. Another one had purplish walls and green tinted paintings of fruits in bowls hung on the walls. Nothing matched to me, nothing fit into place, but more people did come. They stayed for a while but they always ended up checking out, and when they did, I was left alone with an empty lobby, empty halls, and empty rooms, none of which I really liked. I had become someone I didn’t know, someone I didn’t appreciate. I had added on layers that weren’t me and I couldn’t stop. It didn’t matter how much I changed and how much I wanted to feel complete, I could always see the cracks in my walls and the stains adorning my tiles. I could see the wallpaper peeling off in some rooms. I couldn’t see anything else but these faults. So I checked out too. That’s when I started to feel what the world “abandoned” really means. The dictionary defines the word as “left without needed protection or care.” I realized that the protection and the care I ever truly needed and was deprived of, was the ability to protect and to care for myself.

This changed one day. I had a friend who moved in, checked into one of my rooms that I hadn’t seen in awhile. The room had a plain white door, a color that reminded me of pureness and innocence, the sense of starting over with a clean slate. The room itself was plain too. For decoration, there was just a single picture with a tan wooden frame. It had a little alarm clock that made this bright twinkling sound that I remembered liking a long time ago. I waited for him to leave, to check out, but he didn’t, and I asked him why not. “I like who you really are,” he had said. That’s when it hit me that I did not like me.  I didn’t even really know who I was anymore, and I wanted that to change.

I started from the top, from the newest layers, and started to tear them down. I took down the levels and watched them crumble. I saw these new parts of me fall into piles of rubble collecting on the ground. I felt nothing, for these new parts of me were never real parts of me. The only emotion I had was fear, fear that maybe no one would like me once I finished, but I kept going. I tore and destroyed until there was nothing left except that cozy little house I had started with in the beginning. The house, the me that was never good enough, I had missed it, me. I had missed the tan wooden siding with its unique designs and swirls, unlike ones of the Louvre, but one that was special and individual in its own way. The door that didn’t make me feel uncomfortable and the twinkling sound of the doorbell that was strong and expressive in its own way.

My friend stayed and so did many others. They never left and that was important to me, but it was also newly important that I came back too. I stopped becoming something I wasn’t and made changes for myself. I painted the door light blue, not because others liked it, but because I liked light blue. I was still scared, scared that my door would be too blue or not blue enough, but I knew that settling for any other blue would be the same as that hated red siding and the wreath of daisies and the cheesy doorbell song. I am not an abandoned building, and I never truly was until the moment I abandoned myself.

Video format of my poem: