What an Amazing World

Perhaps I just haven’t been sleeping enough as of late. Perhaps I’m stressed and losing myself as I’m forced to live out my days in this brickwalled basement dorm room. But when I go outside I can’t help but stare at the sky. At the clouds. At the trees and the life that surrounds me. 

I feel so intensely this awe and happiness and overwhelming sense of… something.

I’m not sure what. But the universe is expansive, unknowable, defiant and terrible. But the universe is also endless, and so full of endless beauty. I feel so tall, so powerful, when I look up at the sky. What a wonderful world, and an awe inspiring universe beyond it.

In my soul I believe that we can make this universe kind and good. That we can share with everyone this feeling of connectedness, joy, love, inspiration, that I feel when I stare at the night sky alone.

I also feel this doubt that tries to seep into me. Perhaps we will fail, perhaps the universe must be fundamentally terrible. God commands it or suffering is written into the architecture of atoms.

But then what does it matter anyway? If we are destined to fail there’s no reason not to try. If the universe must be filled with suffering as ordained by the divine, I will do my best to be kind anyway.

Perhaps this simply makes no sense at all, but I can’t help but feel a pull to hopefulness even when faced with unconquerable nihilism. There’s just this joy I feel walking through the rain, my jacket soaked and my hair drenched, staring at masses of grey that spin across the sky. 

Life is beautiful. In spite of everything, it’s truly beautiful. Just like how I’m unable to properly describe the sadness I’ve witnessed and felt, I don’t know how to express what I feel now. I just want to yell at the sky, definitely, in spite of it all, “WHAT AN AMAZING WORLD!”

How could we not help but try to share this with everyone?

I know I keep saying ‘in spite of’, but that’s just how I feel. It doesn’t matter if no one is there to hear me assert how incredible the world is. In spite of anything and everything I want to assert that the universe is magnificent, and that we should give the opportunity to experience its majesty to everyone we can.

It’s absurd, really.

Today I lived

I started this year by writing an essay about how terrified I was of changing, of dying, of losing all that I love and hold dear. It was split into sections each titled “Last night I died”, except for the final section, which stood alone with the pledge “Tomorrow I’ll live.”

I am happy to say that as I wrote this new collection of reflections I thought to myself  “Today I lived.” Today I existed with all the intensity and the love and oscillation that I wanted to.

Weird tiny triumphs, like not thinking before I spoke, just saying the things I thought. Admitting to myself when I was wrong and when I was right. Accepting that I have some value, some positive qualities. They made me feel like I was actually alive. Finally a person.

I have this feeling like I’m so many different people. Like a dozen different mes want to exist, each distinct from another. One wants to be shy and one wants to be bubbly. One wants rigor and intense formalization, and another wants to break concepts as they move.

We can never touch, barely ever able to speak to one another, but I vibrate between these people, and these states. Sometimes I’m a new person every second. 

“I hate myself.” 

“No one has ever been as clever as me.”

“Who would love me?”

“How am I so handsome?”

“Did you actually mean that? Your word choice seems to communicate the opposite.”

“Eh, this is about right.”

Sometimes there is this liminal state of existing between them, when I can see all the clutter and all the people walking around my mind. I can’t be all these people, and I can’t excise any one of them. They are me and I am them. I vibrate between them, and the portrait our afterimage paints is the totality of me.

Sometimes one takes a more prominent role, and the brush strokes that sketch my existence become a different shape. Perhaps one day I will learn to oscillate fast enough that my personhood can become perfectly defined. But I am not there yet. I am this messy patch work of people constantly on the brink of falling apart, too stubborn to ever crack.

For the first time in my life I’m not sad to be so many things. I’m not confused. I don’t feel broken. I can accept all these people, and the things they have to teach me. I can accept that I’m made up of all these vibrations, moving at different speeds and different colors to paint some beautiful image in the air. I can accept how fractured I feel, like I’m held together by scotch tape and willpower. This is me.

One day, and I fear this day horribly, I suspect my speed will run out. I’ll crash into myself and my body will stop this constant movement as age breaks my organs. But for today I am happy to be moving with the energy I still have.

Today I am alive.

What will Tomorrow bring?

When I wrote about joining EA I wrote mostly of pain and hate, but I don’t live my daily life wrapped in those emotions. I live my life with curiosity and kindness and laughter. I’m happy I finally found the words to express some of my hope.

I want to help people, and I feel like I’m finally helping myself.

I didn’t do it alone, but for the first time in my life I’m the sort of person I can look up to. Kind, intelligent, funny, strong, and willing to admit how weak they sometimes are. There’s nothing wrong with me and I’m not perfect, I’m just me.

I wish I could go back in time and show myself what I’d one day become. Help myself merge all these parts of myself into the whole I am now. But I can’t change anything I’ve done or reclaim any of the time I spent drifting and lost.

But I can move towards the future. I can shine as brightly and intensely as possible. I can exist for myself and as the beacon I wish I had known how to move towards.

I hope this intensity can help someone else too. And I hope through my actions and desire to do good I will actually bring some about into the universe. I suppose I’ll have to wait and see what tomorrow brings.