Why “I” Feels So Hard
Writing About Others vs. Writing About You
Two People, Same Ideology, Different Personality
Imagine two people who share your core beliefs about fairness, work, love, or even immigration as a merit-based system, yet live those beliefs in completely different ways. On the surface, they stand on the same side. Inside, they are entirely different worlds.
One is quiet, reflective, and structured. This is the person who writes long, thoughtful messages, prefers planning over confrontation, and values clarity over volume.
The other is expressive, intense, sometimes dramatic. A simple discussion turns into a full presentation, complete with hand gestures, emotion, and momentum.
As a friend, you find yourself standing between them like a bridge. With the calm one, conversations slow down. Ideas unfold carefully, and emotional safety feels natural. With the intense one, everything accelerates. Decisions are bold, debates are passionate, and energy fills the room. The ideology is identical, but the emotional climate is not.
As a couple, the contrast becomes even sharper. With one, life feels steady, like a series of gentle seasons with predictable rhythms. With the other, life feels like a limited series, brilliant, intense, unforgettable, and occasionally exhausting. The values align in both relationships. The daily experience does not.
But this story is not really about two different people.
The Magic of the Third-Person You
One day, a realization arrives quietly. There is a third person in this story. That person is you, written in the third person.
At first, writing a self-petition feels almost impossible. How do you praise yourself honestly without sounding artificial or arrogant? How do you say “I am extraordinary” when internally you still feel like a normal human trying to make things work?
Then a small shift changes everything. Instead of writing “I,” you write about “Ramprasad Ohnu.”
He carries your achievements, your journey, your evidence, but he is easier to describe.
“I published important work” feels heavy.
“Ramprasad Ohnu has published important work in his field” feels factual.
“I did a very good job” feels like bragging.
“Ramprasad Ohnu did a very good job” sounds like a fair assessment.
The day you read your EB-1A draft and think, “Wow, Ramprasad Ohnu did a very good job,” something clicks. The writer and the subject are no longer the same character. That distance makes honesty possible without shrinking or apologizing for the truth.
Writing about others has always felt natural. The mind shifts into review mode automatically. Strengths, contradictions, habits, patterns. People become characters in a story. One is calm. One is intense. One is disciplined. One is chaos with Wi-Fi.
Two People Outside, One More Inside
Now the story has three people.
The calm believer who shares your ideology and lives it with restraint and reflection.
The intense believer who shares your ideology and lives it with passion and urgency.
And the third-person version of you, “Ramprasad Ohnu,” created so you can finally write about yourself with clarity instead of discomfort.
The first two teach you that belief systems can be identical while daily life feels completely different. One says, “Let’s think this through.” The other says, “Let’s act now.” Ideology stays constant. Personality defines the tone and volume.
The third teaches a deeper lesson. Writing about yourself is not impossible. It only becomes easier when you stop treating “I” as sacred and start treating yourself as a subject, just like anyone else. At that point, self-petition stops feeling like ego and starts feeling like accurate storytelling.
The Third-Person Trick as a Life Tool
What begins as a legal requirement quietly becomes a psychological tool.
When you feel stuck, you write, “Ramprasad Ohnu contributed here, achieved this, led that.”
When modesty tries to erase your impact, third-person you restores it as fact.
When you read it later and feel surprised by your own work, you realize the issue was never the achievements. It was the discomfort of saying “I” and believing it.
In the end, what started as an article about two people becomes an article about three. Two external personalities who share the same ideology, and one internal narrator who learns that telling the truth about yourself is not arrogance. It is clarity, whether the name on the page is “I” or “Ramprasad Ohnu.”
A Late Introduction
It feels slightly ironic to introduce myself this late, after more than fifty plus articles in Merit Lab.
I am the founder of xoCaliber, which began as a self-assessment experiment and gradually evolved into an organization. From that journey, Meritocrat emerged as a structured self-evaluation platform.
What started as a personal need for clarity became a system designed to help others describe their merit accurately, without discomfort, exaggeration, or apology.
Sometimes, the hardest story to write is your own. The third-person version makes it possible.