Nobody but Myself

All my life I had been looking for something,

 and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.  

I accepted their answers too, 

 though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.

  I was naïve. 

 I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which 

I, and only I, could answer.

  It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging 

of my expectations to achieve a realization 

everyone else appears to have been born with: 

 that I am nobody but myself.  

~Ralph Ellison~