The most terrifying prospect is not that people will discover your secrets and pry open your closet of musty, grotesquely-shaped skeletons. The most numbingly mind-reeling and horrifying prospect is that you have nothing worth hiding or being proud of.

Inside, I drown in a purple sea of narcotics not yet invented to shut off the incessant commentary in my head. The poisons sloshing through my skull do nothing to stop the little tingles of electric fear that push through my nerves to fingertips and lips and hips and toes. But how could they? They aren't real; I conjure up my violent, violet drug soup to help me get through the day. It doesn't help. These Cheshire narcotics appear to work their metaphorical magic on me when I am alone to put a halt to my over-analyzing and criticizing. Not when I am waiting for someone to catch on.

I am not afraid of what you will see in me. My monsters and mistakes have all been exposed to the warm cleansing light of the sun and then filed away neatly in a cabinet of energy-saving streetlights so I can always find them and they will see one another and never be afraid or alone.

I am afraid of what you will not see in me. This prospect is far more petrifying. For someone to discover that nothing in me is original. Everything that I am is a reflection of something I have borrowed from someone else. Not a thought, idea, outfit, song choice, one-liner, cell, DNA strand, or randomly-firing neuron in the dried up, rotting gray matter of my brain comes truly out of me.

Being discovered is frightening. A chip in a meticulously-arranged facade of originality and quality crashing the whole Kinko's mess about my ears. There is nothing that could be worse than the destruction of everything I have built to hide myself and hold in the precious purple sea of numbing narcotics now uninvented. I would rather be a ruined shell of a somebody than an unmarred and pristine nobody. At least the somebody knows she is empty. I have too much to be a nobody and too little to be a somebody. I am in limbo.