The Words I Never Said // A Collection of Essays

Letter #17 // To melt into a continuum and to become a spectrum

Dear Friend,

Finally, I'm writing to you not from some moldy cave of desperation, covered in cobwebs and filled with thick, airless humidity, but from a small cozy field on a hill, which the evening's golden sun blissfully embraces with its warmth, and which, of course, exists in my head only. Summer's grass has already begun sprouting here, and blossoms of dandelions and daisies are preparing to open. It's so warm today! Only the chaotic wind, carrying whole chains of my life events, keeps incessantly disheveling my hair, I keep brushing and brushing strands of them off my face and they still never cease annoyingly getting into my mouth. At least it's warm, at least everything is scented with life...

I'd wanted to write of my relentless desire to fly, soar, run down that hill, and pull away from the ground towards the clouds. I'd wanted to complain about gravity, the paralyzing grip of reality. Yet my fingers refuse to. Dividing life into fantasy and actuality, freedom and restriction, structure and chaos begins to lose its meaning. Because if without one the other wouldn't exist — without the ground under one's feet there'd be nothing to rise from and the concept of flying wouldn't be a thing — only the oppositions are able to make up a whole. If I continue jumping from one end of the continuum to the other, I'll never stop. The perfect balance is impossible, but there is another way out: one could become the continuum itself. I could refuse to choose, refuse to see one pole as the good one and the other as the bad one. I could devote myself to the world and embody the whole spectrum of possibilities, to open up my heart to the absolute variety of things. Perhaps then I could reach the tranquility I so yearn for. Perhaps then I'd stop this constant spinning in a whirlwind of change since I'd myself become the whirlwind and everything around it.

My experiments with self this time circle around the trait of extraversion. Yesterday I threw myself into a pretty social situation. Stimulated by the crowd as well as a conversation with a close person, I felt as if I had raised my shadow self to the surface, and, as a wave of light touched her, she appeared to have so many interesting indentures and grooves. Oh, how I wish to focus on her only, investigate everything novel I got to see, how I wish to run from the self I've known so thoroughly and for so long she's become annoying. How I wish to jump to the other extremity and turn the sides of the moon around.

Yet I can't, for I know this wouldn't be optimal. I'd simply plunge into another neverending cycle of scales turning over and then back again, and I've been going in circles this way for too long. However much I wish, I can't leave my entire identity behind and concentrate on one aspect of myself. I'd definitely go mad, quickly.

Thus, as I slowly explore this, step by step, I thought I could share my current findings with you. It appears I love humans. Not (only) some idealized or perfected versions of them that I automatically create, but all the real, genuine, vulnerable, and fallible human beings. I love people whose lives I don't even exist in directly and have absolutely no significant role in. I love people who do human things, who know of my existence, and who have no idea of it. I love people who smile looking into each other's eyes. I love those who tell stories, who embrace one another, who guffaw, who sob. Like some alien that has just descended onto Earth, I can't stop loving humans with bewilderment, some form of disbelief in what I perceive, for how bizarre these creatures are! 

And thus I suddenly feel a horrible urge to get to know those I love so much. And I don't want to stay at home anymore, barricading myself in my little cave, I don't want to force more psychological theories into my head, and not because they're uninteresting — on the contrary, they're all incredibly fascinating — but I simply wish to be in company, in union, in a community. I wish to belong to a group of people, I wish to get to know them. Hence, with my focus turning around so suddenly, my personal life became a lot less interesting. Is this the reason why the dangers of failing don't seem as frightening anymore? "Don't you dare think that, you will lose yourself," as today's culture which is permeated with individualism would probably say. Learn to love yourself first. Learn to live with yourself first. Discover yourself first. Living with these thoughts for the last almost ten years, I've found a lot but much was also left unsearched. Perhaps this is why as I finally approached more concrete conclusions about my life philosophy — that all phenomena and all objects in the Universe exist in one union — I felt such a pull towards loving other people. Because if we're all a part of the same Universe, I can't love myself without loving others, just as I can't love others without loving myself. After all these years of desperately trying to love myself to the point I reached a total dead end, gently letting in the idea of love for other people was enough, and suddenly my self-love reached its highest point. However, here the moral of the story won't be about aiming for balance. Once you melt into a continuum, you become the spectrum yourself, there's no need to overthink your point of existence in it. Similarly, when you embody love itself there's no need to distinguish between the subject and the object, for they merge, become one and the same, and all of a sudden you realize their distinction has been no more than categories created by the human mind that simplify our cognition but that aren't characteristic to reality. 

You know, I think these conclusions are all I needed. Opening my heart so wide, I must've done all that's in my power to let us meet. Thus, we'll likely see each other very soon. In the meantime, I'll take another attempt at living. Living with unconditional love, not with paranoid fear.

Love,

— Your Friend.

(May 12th, 2023)