Butterflies and Hurricanes

Sometimes I’m deeply struck by the unique experience of being me.

Nobody really knows what it’s like to be anybody else. You may have people who understand you at a viscerally deep level — parents, lovers, best friends, soul mates. But even they don’t know the exact experience of being you.

The noisiness of our thoughts, the texture of our emotions, the weight of our past, the pins and needles of old wounds, the pangs and cravings, the fantasies and imagination, the miasma of memories, jokes and stories that live inside us for years. Nobody can ever be privy to the exact intricateness of our complex inner world, and I find that to be both a blessing and a curse.

No matter how much I express, share, write and talk about who I am, it’s still not going to cover the vastness of the unshareable. The sheer magnitude of my interiority is astounding to me: like a deep blue ocean. Every tiny moment, every single choice, every word that was said to me, every praise, every remark, every heartbreak, every look, every hug, every interaction, every text, every smile, every book, every touch, every movie, every song… all of it adds to this precise current version of myself.

Sometimes there are people who come close to our inner selves—not fully inside, but around the periphery — and for a beautiful brief moment, they get to peek at our real selves. I truly live for those moments. God, the joy and humanity of being seen. But it’s only a sliver. Only a fragment of an impossibly large mass of a messy, intense, terrifying and sometimes traumatizing existence.

The loneliness of being a human being is truly remarkable.

We’re embedded with the knowledge of our place in the world. Of our smallness. Of our mortality. On the other hand, there’s beauty in it too. That only we get to live with our inner voices, only we know what it’s like to be us. That we all see colours with a slightly different filter. That two people looking at a tree may be having completely different experiences. That two siblings who grow up in the same house may have had vastly opposing lives. That fifty people crying during a movie could be crying for fifty different reasons. That what I see and what you see when we look at an old man walking down the street may be based entirely on our singular experiences.

We are uniquely us and that both comforts and baffles me.

This is what makes consciousness so fascinating. One, it is our entire lived experience. Two, there are layers to it we don’t even understand. It’s nature vs nurture. It’s the genes and traits we inherit. It’s the subconscious mind, it’s our un-graspable dreams, it’s our instincts, it’s the fact that we’re seemingly connected not just to each other, but to all forms of life. And three, there’s something magical about how we’re all made of the same recycled matter, breaking down and changing formats over millennia. We’re here because a series of impossibly random things happened in a sequence.

Despite the heaviness, I love knowing I exist for a short while. I live with the growing realisation that I will die, and there is so much more I want to see, feel and experience.

I love being flawed, and I love being human. I love the fact that I’m hurting right now.

I love how messy we are, and we carry hearts that are capable of breaking a million times over. I love us for our art, our music, our writing, our poetry. I love us for our love. I love the drama of it. I love that we have our own layered inner worlds, and every day we have a chance to sit inside these enchanting laboratories full of ache and wonder, and find new ways of bringing out a little piece to show to the world. “Look, this is me. Maybe you understand this too?”

And of course we do. Of course we want to see and be seen, understand and be understood, love and be loved.

I love how despite the heartaches, we always find a way to stretch across our deep blue oceans and reach out to each other. And even if it’s just the faintest brush of the fingers, it’s powerful enough to keep us coming back for more.