How many times have we thought about our personalities? About what makes us whole? How many times have we thought about those tiny aspects of our personality that may be the core of us? How many times have we sat in silence, thinking about our anger and how many times did we recoil in fear of what we might do with it? How many times have we honed our emotions into pretty metaphors or days-long paintings? And let me ask you one more question, how many times have you thought, what am I?
And to answer that question, a very intriguing quiz has been made and is garnering attention from a lot of people. Not only that but it also has quite interesting results. The quiz was inspired by the song “soldier, poet, king” by the Oh Hellos. This quiz, having the same name as the song, tells you whether you’re a soldier, a poet, or a king. And no, it’s not as you think, it’s not that you’re poetic or that you’re dominant or that you love to fight. It’s so much deeper than that. The compelling thing about that quiz is that it asks a bunch of random and surprising questions such as: “what does your anger feel like?” or “what is duty?” and many more thought-provoking ones. Whilst taking the quiz, you’ll find that the questions are seeminglyunrelated,but when you get to the results, you’ll realise how it all ties together in the end.
There’s this saying that the poet is someone who never wanted to be a poet and a king is a soldier who wanted to be a poet. But what does all of this mean? Allow me to enlighten you. Allow me to take a wild guess at what you might have thought what each result would mean. You thought that the poet would mean that you are a person who thrives to create art. You want to make a change and your greatest goal is to create something that matters. You need that lonely, untethered pain to mean something because if you cannot create beautiful things from such pain then what’s it all for? Then comes the soldier, you thought that being the soldier means being angry, so angry that it scares you. Your anger becomes action, that it must be a weapon. Because your anger is hideous if it means nothing, right? Lastly comes the king. The king is someone who you thought would crave meaning. You smother yourself with roles and responsibility to gain some sort of meaning; you must matter. You fear that what you have suffered must be worth something; otherwise, why did you try so hard? Now, let me tell you that it is so much more than that.
Being a poet means that your art channels what you wish you could feel. All you want in this cruel world is to matter, you need to. Because if it doesn’t matter, you don’t know who you are. You think you’re not enough, but you are. You throw your heart out to the world and hope it makes it through, you convince yourself that pain is art because then you’ll have an excuse to create. To shine. You dream of a ground you can stand on. Then comes the soldier, being a soldier means that you wonder sometimes if anger is the only thing you can feel. But you must remember that love is passion too. You made your own rules and will follow them till death do you apart. You are tired of fighting although it is the only rule you know. You dream of serenity and solitude. Your anger can be inane, allow yourself to feel. Finally comes the king. If you got the king, then it means that you were once told to do things and you obeyed. The world was something that was thrusted into your hands, and you were forced to deal with. Responsibility wasn’t your choice, but it was imposed on you with no second option. You won’t take a step away from the throne just because you have deemed it selfish. You are tired of being steady and you dream of being alive because sometimes it’s hard for you to remember that there is a beating heart between your ribs. Maybe someday, whether close enough or far away, you’ll set the crown down and live.
It’s terrifying how some general questions are asked and results are made, and those results resemble us in ways we didn’t even think about. Lots of people, if not all, have agreed that they never expected to get the result they did but then they also agreed that what they got hit home and that’s enough.
So, let me ask you again: are you a poet? A soldier? Or a king?
Written by: Habiba Suleiman
Edited by: Heba Abdelaziz
