What do I think it means to be human?
Maybe it’s this, living with a thousand unnamed storms crawling beneath the ribs. Feeling every ugly thing: hate, envy, jealousy, feelings we pretend we’re above, until they catch us in the dark and whisper: you are not better than the things you fear becoming.
Looking in the mirror and resenting the reflection, because it’s too familiar. Because it looks like the version of you you swore you'd never turn into. It’s seeing people rise, rebuild, and move forward and feeling that sharp twist inside because you’re still stuck, still sinking, and still convincing yourself that you don’t deserve movement.
It’s loving others, quietly, without certainty, while wondering why the same softness collapses when it comes to yourself. Compassion for everyone except the person living behind your eyes.
And fear, God, the fear. Fear of being seen, fear of being wrong, fear of speaking something that might be laughed at or dismissed. Fear that if you share too much, someone will learn the parts of you you’ve spent years burying and decide you aren’t worth knowing after all.
Then there’s despair. The most persistent of them all. The ache that comes when you remember there was a time, small, fragile, and impossible, when you believed the world was gentle. Where you didn’t know about cruelty or loss, and you thought every hand reaching toward you meant safety. You can’t go back there. Time doesn’t give returns.
To be human is to drown in your own complexity. To hurt and overthink and spiral and repeat patterns you swore you were finished with. We carry wounds like heirlooms, passing them down to newer versions of ourselves who still don’t know how to put them down.
And still, we try.
There’s always a rule. Always a weight.
Some call it growth. Some call it suffering. Some pretend it’s beautiful, because the alternative is admitting it hurts.
Maybe being human is doing all of it, holding the contradictions, the chaos, the grief, while pretending the ground beneath you isn’t shaking.
Maybe that’s why we have poets, artists, writers, people who carve their ache into something visible, because silence would crush them. People who try to turn their wounds into language, as if naming the pain could make it loyal instead of feral.
Being human isn’t gentle. It’s not soft or easy or graceful.
It’s the horrifying realization that everything you feel will outlive the moment that caused it, that the hurt will turn into memory, and memory will turn into identity, and one day, not soon, but eventually, you won’t remember who you were before the weight settled in.
And the worst part?
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