If I try to think back on my early 20s it's all mostly a blur, but I can draw some particular instances from the dark recesses of my mind with some focused effort on my part.

Why does it matter? I just don't understand how a person can change so much - myself - inside. This impression of 'change' may well be a mere illusion; after all, people who've known me since childhood often say 'I haven't changed', but there's only a couple of people who know me from that far back in time, and it's easy enough to put up a front even as everything within has been transformed. Transformed, broken, whichever.

I think what I'm mostly feeling is the loss of possibilities that faded away with time as I continued down a different path - yet at the time I had no clue. I could never have guessed that my early choices, if they can be called as such, would lead me to literally atrophy most of my initial personality, or the one that was starting to be shaped into but that got de-constructed, in a way.

After spending most of my early 20s in some sort of mental 'coma', I woke up to find my whole person in pieces - mentally and to an extent even physically. Whoever I was before that 'coma', it was nowhere to be found by the time I did wake up - by the time I finally decided to live life.

It's like... a total of around seven years of my existence was put on pause, and by the time I hit the resume button, it felt like the most painful slap in the face. While my whole life had 'paused', that of others that gone on. The worst part was that I couldn't even resume from where I'd left off. I couldn't just resume life back from the exact point when I shut down in the first place. No... I had to resume 'living' exactly from the point of awakening, leaving me to face a broken self that had missed so much reality factors that it felt, and still feels, like an alien world I'm travelling through.

It's hard to relate to the person I used to be. My only stable anchor point for now is all the way back to my teenage years. It's the equivalent of my last 'system back-up', in more ways than one.

It's hard to remember a version of yourself that could have turned out so differently from the broken version you're now forced to operate. It's... painful. How painful to remember abilities you had, which you no longer have. Is it really possible to atrophy one's own traits and abilities to the point where you end up staring at a completely different version of you?

It must be possible, of course. We either better ourselves through life or we get worse. Pausing existence delays the process, but it doesn't prevent it. Ultimately, we'll either get better, or worse versions of our own selves.

The world, our environment, including people, shape us from the start. Whoever 'we' are in essence is merely a bundle of possibilities and that number of possibilities is slowly eroded along the way by the environment and the people around us. That seems to be the basic, most inevitable rule of existence making us 'who we are' in the end.

Now living mostly like a social recluse unable to form bonds with most people, unable to cope in most social situations - to the point where anxiety becomes so great that I have to leave such situations - it is a rather odd and bittersweet experience to remember a time when I wasn't like that. I always stood out no matter what I did. I'm the sort of person walking into a room that people will remember whether I utter a word or not and I never quite understood why. It never made sense to me that I should stand out so much in the midst of strangers, for instance. I was also always the sort of person you either love or can't stand. Rarely is there room for some in-between, my person always seems to trigger a reaction pertaining to one extreme or the other. Perhaps it is the same for everyone else.

I'm mostly horrified at my loss of social skills these days. How does someone who used to be capable of socialising with others becomes so utterly incapable, to the point where she's now developing social anxiety the more she makes the effort to force-reboot that ability she knows she used to have? Of course, I suppose it doesn't help that the instances in which I force myself to be social happen to involve mostly people I just cannot relate to at all. I can't relate to the people I work with, for instance, to the point where I sometimes wonder if they're even real. I feel so much like I'm immersed in the middle of hostile ground that I can't relax and I certainly can't connect with them.

My lack of engagement is certainly at fault. I don't open up or share random facts of my personal life with others. People in social situations love just that. They talk about what they like, what they don't like, what they've been up to last weekend and what they're planning next, etc. They tell you about their latest drama with their partner, how their kids have been acting like monsters, their latest exotic holiday trip.... I nod and listen, but have no desire to take part. I have nothing to say. But they make you. They probe you and poke you with questions to 'find out' more about you, and I don't cooperate. Everyone does it, everyone I've ever met does it. They ask you all these personal questions to find out about you, get a sense of who you are, and perhaps that is a basic necessity for human bonding, but I never seem to cooperate with that process. For me it feels as though people are prying, forcing their way inside my head to figure out who I 'must' be and from there draw their own little conclusions that will lead them to either like me or loathe me, or remain indifferent.

So I don't cooperate, but people insist, so what do I end up telling them? Lies. I just lie, make things up, or sometimes I just embellish the truth. It's almost never a problem, because most people never get close to me, but a few people did turn out to be good friends along the way and my lies led to friendships based on fabrications of facts - not of my person herself, but the facts of my life.

One of my closest friends thinks I have a sister. We had met years ago at some workplace, and at first she, too, was just a stranger among others. Everyone is always asking you questions, wanting to know your life, and she was lost in the midst of all these other people asking questions. The lie of me having a sister sprung out of my mouth before I knew it, and since then I could only keep up with it. To make things easier - to avoid having to lie to her any more than I already had on my circumstances - I told her that sister had moved abroad and we weren't in good terms. I hinted at painful circumstances that usually make people mindful to not pry further. But still, once you've started making up lies about your circumstances, it takes a life of its own in other people's head, and it seems rather impossible to undo it.

I have another close friend whose vision of me is based mostly on lies. We used to go to school together and she is the only childhood friend I have, a friend from my former life. A couple of years after I disappeared overnight I got back in touch with her, but the contrast between our lives was so great that I couldn't tell her the truth when she asked me why I'd disappeared. I couldn't tell her: "My mum just decided to leave everything behind and start over. We ended up with nothing and nowhere to go, and even right now, as I stand in front of you in the comfort of the posh boarding school in which your parents placed you, I still have no clue what's going to happen to me next."

I couldn't tell her. So I lied. I made up stories just enough to satisfy her queries, for her to build a sense of me now. But these lies, these lies I couldn't avoid at the time because the truth was just too painful to utter, I still have to live with them today. As we met recently, she said something that made me all the more aware of the intricate web of consequences lies can spawn in your wake, and how lies can just as easily as truth can, allow people to build whatever image of you in their heads.

She said to me: "Aliska, you're so strong."

Me, chuckling: "Me? What makes you think that??"

And then she proceeded to mention all the made-up facts I'd told her and which were the basis of her conclusion - of her concluding I must be so strong and triggering her admiration. All I could think of then was that everything she thought of me was not real. Everything she thought of me was based on an illusion. Whatever representation she has of me, it's based on the deepest illusion of all: lies.

Sometimes I find myself fantasising that I sit down with these close friends of mine and tell them the truth, trying to explain how it all happened... but in the cold light of reality it would never hold. If you allow others to believe in lies long enough, shattering those lies is like shattering everything they've come to know you as within them. It shows them one core aspect of you, the fact that you are a liar, a deceiver, a fraud.

And that, I must be. I am. The reason why I hate illusions and all the things I happen to hate about the world... everything I feel so strongly against... I feel so strongly against all this because... all these things I hate or can't stand are like a direct reflection of who I am.

And from this there can be no turning back. It says it all on a much deeper level than I could ever imagine.