Being Itself Being Itself
Presented for your observation:
Seven human beings entered the elevator. They briefly glanced at each other before turning to watch the floor numbers blink on and off in numerical order.
A retired banker. A corporate strategist. A restless young man with curated authenticity. An elderly widow guarding what dignity remained. A teenage girl wrapped in practiced indifference. A businessman armored in opinions. An exhausted physician holding herself together with usefulness and caffeine.
They have arrived carrying coffee cups, private griefs, political convictions, passwords, medications, unfinished arguments, and the uneasy suspicion that everyone else received an instruction manual denied to them.
No one entirely remembers why they agreed to attend this meeting. Or perhaps they do remember. But each remembers differently.
Observe them carefully. Seven lives. And inside each one, clutching the controls with frightened determination, resides a small and anxious creature called The Me. Not evil. Not monstrous. Simply terrified.
This evening, these seven travelers are participating in a conversation none of them expected – a conversation about identity itself. The elevator doors opened with a synthesized ding at the 26th floor. But tonight’s destination is a region just beyond the final defenses of The Me.
They are entering… Being Itself.
Each entered the room, looking around. The room had been designed by a committee that feared both color and silence. So, the space was respectable. Not beautiful. Not warm. Just respectable.
A long conference table sat beneath fluorescent lights that hummed with the faint electrical fatigue of modern life. The walls were painted a color that could only be described as Administrative Beige. A coffee pot steamed beside a tray of untouched cinnamon rolls, slowly surrendering beneath plastic wrap. Somewhere above the ceiling tiles, hidden machinery breathed and clicked like a sleeping animal.
One by one, each sat around the table. Choosing the head, as if preordained, was Gerald Vane, seventy-three, retired regional bank vice-president, whose neckties still fought wars that had ended decades earlier. Gerald believed himself to be a practical man. Rational. Experienced. Yet beneath his polished calm, he trembled at the possibility that retirement had erased him from the world entirely.
To Gerald’s left sat Monica Bell, forty-six, director of something strategic and vaguely technological. Monica’s smile was perfected to corporate specifications: warm enough to imply humanity, restrained enough to avoid vulnerability. She lived in terror that one missed email, one younger employee, one new software platform might reveal she had been improvising competence for twenty years.
Across from her, Tyler Wynn lounged, lowering himself nonchalantly into the leather-and-chrome chair. He was twenty-eight, beard carefully cultivated to appear accidental. He wore a designer tee-shirt under a leather bomber jacket. Tyler often spoke of authenticity, distrusting institutions, systems, labels, and “performative structures.”
Next to Monica sat Evelyn Pike, eighty-one, carrying a purse large enough to survive societal collapse. She had buried a husband, two sisters, and nearly every friend she once telephoned regularly. Her Me had become small and defensive, like an old dog startled awake too quickly. It whispered constantly: Do not become a burden.
Across from Evelyn sat Jasmine Cortez, sixteen, who had mastered the modern art of appearing bored while feeling everything battering her at hurricane intensity. The Me inside Jasmine fed upon mirrors – literal mirrors, digital mirrors, the imagined mirrors inside other people’s eyes. It asked every waking moment: Am I enough yet?
Next to Jasmine sat Leonard Krill, upright and competent. At fifty-seven, he owned three appliance stores and two divorces. Leonard believed in hard work, common sense, and cholesterol medication. His Me had calcified long ago into certainty: about politics, about morality, about what was wrong with everybody else. Deep beneath this fortress, however, crouched a terrified Me, suspicious that life had somehow happened without ever explaining itself to him.
At the far end sat Priya Narayanan, thirty-four, emergency room physician, exhausted in the bone-deep way no longer assuaged by sleep. Priya’s Me had learned to survive by being useful. If she stopped helping, stopped performing, stopped carrying impossible things for impossible people, she might disappear altogether.
Seven people. Each with a life-crafted self called The Me.
Each participant suspected that someone else at the table was the problem. Outside, evening settled quietly over the city. Inside, seven nervous little kingdoms prepared to defend imaginary borders.
The silence stretched.
Then Jasmine sighed, removed one earbud, looked around the table, and asked, “So… what exactly are we supposed to be doing here?”
“I suppose I must be the chairman,” Gerald gruffed. “Who will be taking the minutes?”
Everyone looked at Monica. She bristled for just an instant, then recaptured her practiced smile.
Priya opened her computer case and extracted a silvery laptop. “I suppose I could,” she said quietly.
Leonard looked up and down the table. “Will someone please explain why we are here?” He was met with dumb stares.
Then Evelyn noticed a folded sheet of paper resting near the center of the table.
“Oh,” she said softly. “There are instructions.”
“Of course, there are instructions,” Tyler muttered, leaning over, reaching toward the note. With practiced grace and authority, Monica beat him to it. She unfolded the paper and instinctively slipped into presentation mode.
“Welcome to Community Building Through Radical Listening.”
Tyler groaned audibly. Jasmine smirked. Leonard folded his arms. Monica continued, “Participants are encouraged to speak from personal experience rather than objective certainty. Begin responses with the phrase ‘I think’ whenever possible.”
“That already sounds exhausting,” Leonard muttered. Monica kept reading, “Opening statement for discussion: ‘Most people are pretending.’”
The room shifted almost imperceptibly, seven nervous systems busily measuring danger.
Tyler spoke first. “Well, society is basically built on performance.”
“We’re supposed to use ‘I think’ statements,” whispered Evelyn, almost to herself.
“OK. OK!” Tyler groaned. “I think society is basically built on performance.”
“I think that’s nonsense,” Leonard replied almost before Tyler’s words ended. “Some people are real.”
Tyler laughed sharply. “See? That right there. You’re already performing toughness.”
“I’m just telling the truth,” Leonard huffed.
“There is no ‘just telling the truth.’ That’s your perspective,” Jasmine said with her practice, bored whine.
Gerald straightened slightly in his chair. “I think people confuse perspective with facts these days.”
Jasmine rolled her eyes. “I think older people say that whenever somebody younger disagrees with them.”
Gerald frowned. “People are too sensitive these days.”
Jasmine gave a short, wounded laugh. “Whatever.”
Monica stepped in smoothly. “I think we may be moving away from the purpose of the exercise.”
Tyler turned toward her. “Exercise? Are you saying this is just a waste of our time?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“‘That’s not what I meant,’” he mocked. “Corporate Speak for: ‘Please stop making things uncomfortable.’”
Monica’s smile tightened. “That’s not what I meant.”
“See?” Tyler said, pointing at her.
Priya finally looked up from the laptop. “I think everybody’s getting defensive.”
“Fine,” Leonard muttered. “I’ll just stop talking altogether.”
“No one said that,” Monica replied.
“You implied it.”
“I think you inferred it.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gerald sighed.
Evelyn shrank slightly into herself. “Oh, don’t mind me,” she murmured. “I’m sure everyone else understands this better than I do.”
“No,” Priya said immediately. “That’s not…”
But now everyone was speaking at once.
“You’re twisting my words…”
“That’s not what I said…”
“…proving my point!”
“People cannot say anything honestly anymore…”
“You’re not listening!”
“I am listening…”
“No, you’re waiting to respond…”
“Well, maybe if people toughened up a little…”
“Maybe if people admitted they were scared…”
“Scared of what?” Tyler and Gerald shouted together.
Almost in unison, Priya, Monica, and Jasmine shouted, “Exactly!”
Voices collided and stacked atop one another until language itself became little more than a whirlwind of emotion.
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The coffee machine sputtered. Somewhere in the ceiling, hidden machinery breathed and clicked.
And then, unexpectedly, Evelyn Pike raised one small trembling hand. Not dramatically. Not with authority. More like a child asking permission to exist.
Everyone slowly stopped talking.
Evelyn swallowed. “I think…” she began softly, “I think maybe nobody here knows what we’re supposed to be defending anymore.”
Silence.
Not conversational silence. Not waiting-for-your-turn silence.
Real silence.
The Me of each person momentarily ran out of material.
No one moved. Tyler stared at the table.
Monica stopped arranging her expression.
Leonard’s jaw unclenched slightly.
Jasmine looked suddenly young.
Priya slowly closed the laptop.
Gerald removed his glasses.
And for one strange suspended moment, seven frightened identities sat together in the quiet wreckage of their own defenses.
No victory. No conclusion.
No one right.
No one wrong.
Only awareness.
Each sitting in the unbearable rubble of the possibility, beneath all their performances, arguments, wounds, and carefully defended selves…
They might already belong to one another.
The silence lingered.
Then the door behind them opened.
A custodian backed slowly into the room, pulling a yellow utility cart laden with spray bottles, paper towels, and the weary machinery of ordinary maintenance. He stopped when he saw them all staring at him.
“Oh,” he said mildly. “You’re here.”
No one answered.
The old man glanced around the table, taking in the abandoned cinnamon rolls, the untouched coffee, the closed laptop, the seven faces still suspended somewhere between embarrassment and revelation.
“Well,” he said at last, “that usually happens.”
Gerald frowned slightly. “What usually happens?”
The custodian shrugged. “People come in here thinking they’re seven different things.” A faint smile crossed his face. “Most leave wondering if they’re all actually one.”
Tyler blinked.
Monica unconsciously closed the folder in front of her.
Jasmine slowly removed her second earbud.
The old man rested both hands atop the handle of the cart. “You’d be surprised,” he said, “how much noise a person can make trying to protect boundaries that were never really there to begin with.”
No one spoke. Outside the room, somewhere far down the corridor, a floor buffer hummed like a distant engine. The custodian nodded politely, as though the meeting had concluded exactly as expected. Then he stepped backward through the doorway.
Before the door closed, he paused and looked back one final time. He saw them, not as individuals, but as a whole, at the place beneath the arguments. The place beneath the biographies.
The place beneath The Me.
And with the faintest trace of a knowing smile, he said: “Take good care of one another. You’re about all you’ve got.”
The door clicked shut.
The fluorescent lights hummed softly overhead.
And around the conference table, seven human beings sat in silence – each listening, perhaps for the first time, to the strange and spacious presence waiting quietly behind the endless voice of The Me.
Jasmine rose and went to the tray of cinnamon rolls.
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