Who are you and what are You?

It has been an equally interesting & challenging, painful & beautiful, exciting & frustrating chapter of my life. I went through time, seeing reality not as it really is. I found it unimaginably deep, in terms of complexity and contradiction, and sometimes even conflicts. Yet it was never far from what we hope or fear or expect it to be.

Obviously, I was confused as I took certainty for truth and my belief for evidence. Then I collided with the unexpected, and almost inevitably I plunged into bewildered hopelessness. The other part of the story is quite weird, I felt alive intensely, and this intensity is something I have never felt. I could not pretend that I was without fear, and to be honest it chilled my bones from the very first day here. I came here with an enormous amount of pressure; the pressure of expectations, the pressure of ambitions, the pressure of proving myself. As I was struggling with myself, these quickly went on to be demons inside my mind. I was afraid, and even when I am writing this, I can still feel the cold waves through my spines. But it took me twenty-something years to be close to myself with this new-found intensity of being alive, though I constantly feel I haven't met the entirety of it, and this surge of my being is slowly freeing me from those demons.

We can change. People might say we can't, but we do it only when the stakes or the pain is high enough. The change becomes more of itself, if we can make time to look through our mind palace. There are no final versions of ourselves, we never stop on changing; and there is no final destination for ourselves, it's just an endless journey unless we die. Naturally, we're going to care when we shouldn't, we're going to stay longer than we should, & we're going to give when we have nothing. This is the journey, and learning to accept it this way definitely is not effortless.

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. But I've never been a poet, or a writer, or an expressive person who knows how to reach everyone's minds. But I'm proud that sometimes I can truly speak my mind, maybe in a peculiar way, but it stands for me whenever I look for it.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel, but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And all I'm talking about is feeling, the things I have felt, not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever we think or we believe or we know, we're a lot of other people; but the moment we feel, we're nobody but ourselves.

To be nobody-but-myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me everybody else ??” means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and I know I can never stop fighting. I was going through a storm, I looked for help; a silent presence of another soul could be a thousand times more powerful than some empty words. Yet, there were only words, no presence. This made me free, free in the sense that I belong to no place. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection to all of its parts. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong, perhaps truth is love and love is truth. I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to achieve new levels of insight. I want to be grateful, and humble. I want to be that nobody-but-myself.

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