It’s late, and I’m sitting here with that familiar hum in my chest—the one that isn’t quite anxiety, isn’t quite longing. It’s more like a quiet friction. A gentle war between what I’ve been handed as "the way to live" and what I actually feel when I stop performing for a moment.
I keep bumping into people who seem to have it all figured out. You know the type. They speak in absolutes and hand out moral checklists like they’re dispensing medicine for a sickness we all share. They’ve got the framework, the doctrine, the neat little boxes for everything: right, wrong, worthy, unworthy. And I sit there, nodding along, but inside? Inside, I’m screaming.
Because how can you preach about life—about love, about surrender, about pain—if you’ve never actually been in it? If you’ve never let the waves crash over you, never tasted saltwater and tears in the same breath? How can you advise me on fire when you’ve never even singed your own fingertips?
For so long, I bought into the idea that life was a puzzle to solve. That if I just found the right philosophy, the right set of rules, and the right authority to follow, everything would click into place. I deferred to the experts, the ones standing on pedestals, speaking about waters they’d never swum in. And I tried. God, I tried to live that way—clean, correct, contained.
But abstract wisdom built on distance is just… hollow. It tastes like cardboard. It feels like a hug from someone who’s already halfway out the door.
I’m tired of it. Tired of intellect that builds walls instead of bridges. Tired of logic that shields us from feeling instead of helping us navigate it. The more we use our minds to protect ourselves from vulnerability, the more we end up alone. And I don't want to be alone in my head anymore. I want to be with people. Real, messy, unpredictable people.
Give me someone who feels too much over someone who knows too much. Give me an honest adversary who’s been broken open over a saint who’s never bled. I’d take one moment of raw, unfiltered truth from a trembling voice over a lifetime of polished, correct speeches.
I think what I’m choosing, maybe for the first time consciously, is the heart. Not the sentimental, fluffy version of it—but the wild, reckless, open-heart that says yes before it calculates risk. The heart that tastes both the honey and the ash. The heart that doesn’t demand life be categorised before it can be lived.
I don’t want to be a philosopher of my own existence anymore. I want to be a participant.
So lately, I’ve been letting go of the big abstractions. The grand, unanswerable questions that keep me spinning in circles. Instead, I find myself leaning into the small, sacred, ordinary moments. The way light falls across the floor in the evening. The weight of a shared silence with someone who gets it. The slow unravelling of a conversation that doesn’t need to prove anything.
Those moments don’t ask me to be right. They just ask me to be there.
And maybe that’s the only real question worth asking today: not what should I believe? but am I really here? Am I present? Am I open? Am I letting life touch me, or am I still hiding behind walls I built out of fear?
I’m done trying to fit into someone else’s version of virtue. I’m done polishing my edges to make them more acceptable. I just want to live—fully, recklessly, tenderly—right here in the beautiful, chaotic, intoxicating mess of being human.
That’s not an answer. It’s not even a conclusion.
It’s just where I am right now.
And for once, that feels like enough.
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