Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
We are much alike, she and I. We are so similar that if a list of our trait, attributes and merits were held side by side in lieu of portraits, we would be proclaimed twins.
I am like her, the glue that binds my cell together. I am the peacemaker, the one who breaks up and/or mediates arguments and spats, smoothes ruffled feathers, throws water on burning bridges and levels out broken ground.
I am like her, held up against my teammates and always seen lacking. They are the ones with exceptional skills; we have nothing to compare with it. We are looked at and seen as utterly, pathetically mediocre; for different reasons and with different causes, but it's all the same. We are middle-of-the-line kunoichi in the eyes of all the world that matters, average but lacking the potential to be extraordinary, unlikely to ever rise in the ranks or achieve recognition.
I, like her, have grown stronger. I have trained and trained and trained, bled and sweated. I have become more than just acceptable, more than just competent, quietly perhaps, almost unnoticeably, but stronger I am.
But unlike her, I never caused strife amongst the team I arbitrated. I never caused strife, fatal strife amongst my cell with my very presence. I never turned one against the other; I never played the sides or whined or wheedled. I never gave weakness as an excuse so I wouldn't have to fight.
Unlike her, I never sought the limelight. I never looked for fame; I never looked for one defining, insanely suicidal situation to put myself in so I could prove my worth, possibly at the cost of my life. Unlike her, I am not driven by a suicidal need to be recognized.
Unlike me, she has over-compensated in her pursuit of strength. She aimed to grow stronger in a fashion that all could see (she looked for the sort of strength that is empty and soulless, and that's why I think what's happening to her is happening now), so that none would ever be able to call her weak again, and she has, but the ultimate consequence was not all that she wished. She is perhaps too strong for her own good.
Instead of asking too little of her, the world now asks too much, far too much (it's a burden that has never sat well on any shoulders, let alone hers), and the strain takes a terrible toll on her. She, the girl, recedes into she, the image and all the tacked-on words and labels. She is losing herself to those words, while I remain relatively whole (no shinobi stays completely whole for long, but I'm better off than she is) in my comfortable anonymity.
She sought the light and lost herself to it, while I sought the shadows and found so much more. Her choices are no longer her own, because she has a face that can be twisted and manipulated by outside forces, and I, faceless and anonymous, keep my soul in a deep, dark place where no corrupting influence can ever find it let alone influence it.
She is dying slowly surrounded in light while I live and thrive cloaked in darkness. When light is compared against darkness, we only seem similar if we look through a gritty mirror and see each other, standing on the opposite ends of existence.
And that is how I know I'm not her.