If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life — and over the past year and a bit in particular — it’s that healing isn’t usually what we expect. It’s not linear, nor is it all uphill, it’s not easy and it’s certainly not predictable. Just when we think we’ve made progress we feel we take ten steps back.

We also often make the mistake of thinking that healing has a start and an end. For many people and for certain wounds the process is life-long. Some things we’ll heal from quickly and easily — other things will take time, and all we see is progress not completion. These might be emotional wounds, mental scars or physical ones.

Recovering from surgery has certainly surprised me: though from the outside I just have four tiny marks on my belly, on the inside I can feel that there’s so much going on. It’s been almost 6 weeks and I still feel exhausted by a full day at work. Running 10 metres hurts my stomach muscles. My digestive system has gone on holidays and invited everything responsible for regulating my hormones and moods with it too. I feel much more fragile than usual — sometimes I’m a bundle of worst-case scenarios and nerves, other times I’m a whiner and the rest of the time I just feel sad.

But I can definitely see myself getting back to where I was before! I get a little bit stronger and a little bit sharper every week. And if nothing else good comes from the whole experience, I’ve been overwhelmed by how many love me and think of me and miss me when I’m not around.

What has it looked like for you?

My friend’s great grandmother used to say she still felt like a young girl inside — it was only when she looked in the mirror that her reflection told her otherwise. Recently, she has begun to blur at the edges, convinced that the news presenters are all talking in Latvian. She’s over 100 now and everyone thinks she’ll live forever.

But, most of us are conquerable. Eventually, our fleshy selves will decay until we’re blown away into the wind like piles of dust. Most people find this thought disconcerting. We prefer to fool ourselves into thinking we will live forever, like wily, 100-year-old Latvian emigrants.

I just turned 25, and I’ve finally reached an age where I’m not so keen on getting older. 25 means you’re no longer in your early twenties, and while you’re still young you’re also closer to being 30 than being a teenager. It’s terrifying.

In so many ways, I feel suspended at 20 years old. I’ll eternally see my parents as 50 years old, and I still see my brothers in their early twenties though one has a family and the other has been a doctor for several years now.

I have strange out-of-body moments when I realise how old my friends and I have become. We’re sitting at dinner having conversations and being thoroughly responsible and at least 80% sensible and my eyes glaze over and I realise we’re not getting drunk and kissing people we shouldn’t and to top it off we’ve known each other for six, seven or maybe even 13 years and look at us now: we’re adults.

When you’re 25, there’s a sense that your life should be on the right track; that you should have at least a minimum number of things figured out. A lot of people I know simply panic when they realise they’re nowhere near the number of things they think they ought to be. If I look at my life objectively, I’m doing okay. So why do I too feel the nudge of panic?

Perhaps no matter how much we’ve all individually achieved or not achieved, we all feel a keen sense of the finite nature of time. That there are so many things we’d like to do or have figured out, and maybe we’re just cruising through life and one day we’ll all be out of time.

Putting a time limit on anything immediately causes panic. We sit there happily in denial until 90% of our time has elapsed and suddenly we’re running late for our meeting, or our essay is due tomorrow, or we have one more year left to make something meaningful of our life.

Why this aversion to time passing? So many of us suffer from an inability to truly live in the present, always worrying about “what next”, and yet we fear the future as much as we long for it. Time is a strange phenomenon: by the time you finish reading this sentence it will be in the past. But there was a time when it was in your present. We say we want to live in the present, but can the present ever really exist?

We’re so often impatiently waiting for time to pass that we feel shocked and offended when it pays us the same favour, and suddenly we feel time is waiting for us to pass. It’s the tour guide, hurriedly rushing us along through the museum until we get to the gift shop and we’re surprised to realise the whole thing is over and all we have to show for it are imperfect memories and a crappy plastic keyring.

We have been given so many days and hours and minutes and seconds — and yet we simply waste or forget them. Why do we go on holidays if only to forget 90% of them? Why do we have parties or weddings or even go to school when most of it will be lost in the past forever? I remember almost nothing of every single maths class I ever had — I had to Google how to calculate percentage increase the other day. Why remember anything at all when there’s a digital record of it somewhere?

But then in our haste to make the most of our lives — to tick items off our bucket list or YOLO our way to the grave — we fool ourselves into thinking that the more we cram into our lives, the more we’re living. All that happens is that time goes faster and we’re even more terrified than before.

One of my best friends, Dinesh, says a lot of things — some of them wise, some of them not so wise. One night at dinner, he was quietly observing me and another friend talk about why humans need to have sex with every person they feel they need to have sex with. My friend and I sparred for a while, until a lull in the conversation allowed Dinesh to say in a low, solemn voice: “It all comes down to the fact that humans can’t sit in a room for 15 minutes by themselves, not doing anything.”

Time was suspended in the face of such infinite wisdom. This sentiment originated with Pascal, in his Pensées: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

We fill our lives with all the things we ‘want’ — and a lot of things we don’t — mostly because we can’t bear to be alone with ourselves, quietly, for even five minutes. When I spent five months overseas, with few other humans to talk to beyond baristas, I was forced into my head most of the time. I ended up absolutely detesting it. It wasn’t until I admitted to actually hating the real me that I could face sitting quietly for 15 minutes. Slowly I learnt to get comfortable, to live in my body again, and really see through my eyes.

Now, I look for hillsides to sit on for a while, just staring at the view. I allow myself to lie in bed on Saturday mornings staring blankly at my surroundings and marinating in my thoughts. I force myself to stop and not say anything on sunny days, to lie down on the grass and just stare up at the sky. These moments are some of the most vivid and lovely memories I have because I took time to exist in them, appreciate them, and remember them. They are moments coloured with peace and contentment, and I want to fill my days with more moments just like them.

When I stretch my 25 years out into all of the seconds and minutes and hours and places and faces I’ve lived through, another 25 years doesn’t seem so scary. Because there are so many seconds in 70 more years (fingers crossed) and so many places and faces I’m sure I’m yet to discover. And so many faces in my present that I hope to take with me into the future.

It is up to me to fill those seconds intentionally, never be lost in details but stop for long enough to appreciate the beauty in the small things. I need to remind myself that the world is waiting to be discovered — but that it’s still worthwhile rediscovering your own backyard. And if that’s the only thing I see for the next 70 years, well, it’s just a different sort of adventure.

I still remember that day, the very first day. I remember I wore jeans with pink spots, a white shirt, a grey jumper and heels. I remember what the room looked like; who was in it. I remember the awkward self-consciousness of a newcomer amongst a group of people who seemed to be a well-oiled machine with no need for me.

Today, the last day, is unseasonably warm; blue skies, iridescent sunshine. I’ve already had two coffees, I rode my bicycle, my hair is less blonde and my clothes are more casual.

The space between here and there is immeasurable: I feel as though I’ve inhabited so many different lives, personalities, journeys and realities between May 21, 2012 and September 11, 2015. But I suppose that’s how it feels for most people in their twenties (apparently there’s a scientific reason for it). Who you are changes so rapidly, so often, that it’s almost dizzying. You can’t trust your feelings, opinions, or outlook because in a few short weeks you may go from one end of the spectrum to the other.

How could I possibly quantify so much change, so much growth?

Of all the things I learnt, there were of course some very practical and useful things: I feel like a much more mature writer and editor (though I still have a long way to go), I love process and organisation more than ever before, I’ve learnt to get over my hatred for spreadsheets, I’ve been amongst the behind-the-scenes workings of a magazine and publishing business for over three years now, I’ve learnt so much about business, startups, measuring performances and why KPIs aren’t a necessary evil but a necessary good. I understand more about working with people, being a leader, being a coordinator, about communicating, being diplomatic but directive. I can confidently tackle Wordpress quirks, have much greater abilities in graphic design than before, sometimes have success fixing code and DNS issues, and the day I figured out what FTP files were, how to edit them, and updated some CSS on our homepage without breaking the website was one of my favourite achievements. I couldn’t figure out how to do it again though, so don’t ask…

That’s one of the wonderful things about working in a startup: you really do everything. And, with such a trusting boss, I was able to dream up ideas and run with them. It’s hard, but incredibly worthwhile. And it’ll teach you who you are much quicker than working in a large company will.

But beyond these practical skills, the best and biggest things I learnt are also the hardest to quantify. If I had to distill them into just five points, I think I’d choose these…

1. When you’re not afraid, you’re probably not learning

The best things happen on the edge of uncomfortable. So, if you feel terrified every day you’re at work, then, depending on the reasons, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The last three and a bit years have stretched me, my abilities and what I was capable of — and I have Judy to thank for that. Every time I hit my head against a brick wall, she’d push me until I got through it. She gave me space and trust to find my feet and grow, and direction when I needed it most.

I don’t think you truly know who you are until you have to find out under pressure. It’s in those in-between times — between the beginning and the end, between one stage and the next, between failure and success — that you often lose yourself, only to find a much more richly coloured in version than you knew before.

2. People are complicated — take time to learn why

What I loved learning most was to discover, differentiate and determine the differences between the many people I came into contact with. It’s still a skill I’m still mastering, but it really just requires approaching every person as an individual with their own separate set of experiences, beliefs, opinions, values and understandings. The best place to begin is with a conversation: take the time to know them, to understand them, to walk in their shoes.

3. Perspective is everything

Seeing the details is useless if you can’t see the bigger picture. But only seeing the bigger picture is highly ineffective if you’re unable to drill down into detail. Being able to shift your perspective is incredibly useful. It allows you to work smarter, understand other people better, and also find ways to trick your own brain. Finding different ways to approach things that have lost their excitement will inject new life and energy into the most lifeless situations.

And if you honestly can’t understand where another person is coming from, or how your actions affect them, you may as well be running around in a glass factory smashing everything in site. Because that’s pretty much what it’s like when you refuse to apply perspective to your interactions with others.

4. Don’t put limits on anything — on you, your coworkers, your abilities, your work, your plans, your imagination

You might just surprise yourself. Or those things might just surprise you. Be open to changing your mind, to discovering a new side to something or someone, and to being amazed. Give yourself the space to be pleasantly surprised.

5. Where you’re going is usually not where you imagine you’ll end up

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Media & Communications) and a double major in French. I wanted someone to pay me for writing; I wanted to be editor of a magazine. I wanted to travel, meet people and be someone. Most of that came true.

But eventually I realised that for all my desire for control, the smartest thing for me to do was to give it up completely. We have no way of knowing where we’ll be next week, let alone next year. If we follow our noses, our guts and our hearts, I firmly believe we end up in the exact place we were meant to be. It’s about finding that balance between action and acceptance.

I could never have foreseen that I’d be doing the things I am now. And if there’s such a huge gap between where I was and where I am, then what’s the point in trying to see the future? All my prophetic attempts have been way off. I learnt to have dreams, know what I want and reach for that, but not try to see my future.

Only when you let the present mould you, do you become the person you were always meant to be.

Behind my brother’s house in the suburbs of Chicago is a large wooded parkland. A trail snakes its way through dense trees and small bogs before it traces alongside a vast, glassy lake. Then it disappears back into the trees and off to I’m-not-sure-where. The late afternoon sunlight caresses the edges of the leaves and trickles in streams onto the undergrowth.

It reminded me of the nature reserve behind our old house; a place that once felt vast, magic and mysterious but gradually became smaller as I grew up. It reminded me of walks as a child, exploring beyond the backyard — and more specifically of my father; his tendency to let his imagination wander off down the path and deep into the trees. To him, every lamp post was a sign that we’d arrived in Narnia; every toadstool was an indication of fairies nearby; every wildflower a magnificent wonder, created by the ultimate Creator. He poured fairy dust into my imagination and bid it fly. He’d look at me with a glassy twinkle in his eyes, and in a small and mysterious whisper, he’d tell me of what he knew was waiting just nearby — but only our imaginations could see.

My father filled my head with stories. It was he who took my hand and led me into the worlds of Narnia, Middle Earth and mid-19th century England (Sherlock Holmes, George McDonald’s fairytales…). Although it was my mother who delighted to take me into Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Wood (for some reason Dad couldn’t stand moon face).

My imagination met its match in his. When I wrote letters to the Easter Bunny asking for photographic evidence, he would send his inexplicably dyslexic reply on even more inexplicably charred paper, written in crayon, apologising that he’d lost his last photo or his camera was broken. Santa Claus would expressly request a glass of brandy and a mince tart — not milk and cookies — for Christmas, and Rudolph would always leave half of his carrot uneaten by the fire place.

My dad loved — and still loves — everything fanciful but almost believable. He is a man of great depth and contradictions: in another life he could have been the modern day George McDonald or CS Lewis — an imaginer, theologian and writer. But in this life he chooses these as side pursuits: he is in fact a doctor, a researcher and a talented leader. He is a scientist with imagination — though arguably, all great scientists must have greater imaginations to imagine what might be there beyond their hypotheses in order to conduct research to begin with.

Although we disagree on certain things, I see more and more that my intersecting worlds of imagination, faith and knowledge — different ways of seeing, being and perceiving — come from him. I am sentimental and nostalgic like him; I love mysteries, people and pasts I never knew. But it is with my mother’s creative abilities and honest sense of self that I express this. He gave me the content, and she gives me the vehicle.

I saw all of these things in the back of my head, and I stored them in those woods in Chicago — woods half a world removed from the original places where my own life took shape.

But in this wood, a new life was taking shape.

My brother and I walked through the wood one warm afternoon shortly after I arrived in Chicago. My niece Madeline — then five and a half months old, the most adorably chubby thing in the world, so honest with her likes and dislikes — was secured to Daniel’s chest. As we walked and talked, he would pause to explain what we were looking at to Maddie: the dragonflies, the bog, the reason why leaves are green.

Unlike our father, Daniel trades more in facts. Dad loves the wonder of science and nature; seeing it as the ultimate artistic expression of a loving creator. Daniel seems to see things as they are and for how they function. His creative brain draws connections in different, more practical ways, but still lofty and incredible. I love to see how his mind works: we both think on a vast scale, but in completely different directions.

His rational, logical, scientific and discerning mind is softened by a love for stories, humour and a strong faith. The explicable meet the inexplicable — or simply harder to see.

Maddie will grow up raised on the rational, on the known and achievable — but this will by no means restrict her. Her parents are brilliant, and their brand of imagination flourishes in deliberate action. Linda (her mother) has seen the world, followed her feet, her dreams and her heart — the only difference between us is I tend to do so blindly, with more heart than rationality. Daniel has won every award for everything, is loved by everyone who meets him, and simultaneously amazes everyone who meets him. His grade two teacher correctly predicted that whatever Daniel would do, it would be highly specialised, and he would be one of very few people to do it.

Despite this, I know Maddie will hear whispers — whispers from her aunt and her grandfather — not about what is, but what could be. We plan to covertly fuel her imagination and let it take flight in the ways we so greedily revel in.

Mum often tells me that Dad would look at me when I was a baby and wonder what I’d be like when I grew up. But my mother, seeing each moment for its true worth, would pull him back to the present and tell him to enjoy me as I was right then. She knows the transient nature of time, the value of memory and the weight of loss. Every present moment is a gift from God, to be appreciated for its simultaneous finiteness and infiniteness.

This tension has been a pivotal point in my life: the dissonance between imagined futures and the need to appreciate moments exactly as they are. Mum is far more adept at the latter. She worries (so do all women), but she also sees silver linings, the best in people, God’s hand in all situations, the hope in seemingly hopeless events. She has mastered the present with one eye on the future.

I’ve been striving for so long to live in the present: to not be carried away by longings, desires and imagined presents or futures. I write about this often when I travel. During my time in France, England and Spain, it was a constant philosophical wrestle to reconcile my longing to look ahead with my need to appreciate what I was experiencing in the present. I was torn by the fact that I couldn’t appreciate moments for what they were; always wondering what was coming next. “Each is a reprieve and a curse,” I wrote, “to live in anticipation, and horror that once the anticipated has arrived it will disappear as quickly as it came.”

My conclusion was that it was impossible to live in the present. But now I have decided that I’m both right and wrong.

While I was in Spain I read CS Lewis’ classic memoir Surprised by Joy. I remember one simple section spoke to where I was waiting in my mind. Lewis describes an experience with his childhood tutor; a rational, unimaginative man. He mentions off-hand that the countryside reminds him of another part of England, and his tutor asks him why. He can’t put his finger on anything specific, and his tutor is disgruntled by his audacity to compare one part of the country with another at all. Lewis summarises the lesson in a simple, valuable lesson:

“Shut your mouth, open your eyes and ears, take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. That can come later if it must come at all.”

From that moment on, both he and I sought to see places exactly as they were. It’s a normal tendency to compare things to what we already understand, to make us feel content or nostalgic, but also to understand what they mean and how to interpret them. This is why we feel so out of place in completely new cultures: unable to compare them to anything we know, we cannot place them in a box, give them a label or find a point of reference. They are outside our realm of extrapolation.

And so I began my great attempt to appreciate places as they were. I took my father’s imaginative wonder at small details and watched the way the waves in San Sebastian fell in over themselves and shattered into a million tiny pieces of glass, plunging downwards in hopeless abandon as they gave way to the pull of gravity. I had been feeling anxious and darkened, walking in a mental space that would become my white room. But, this deliberate stopping to describe things in detail — in words — until I could accurately describe the pitch and fall of a wave to someone who had never seen a wave before; the rise of the mountain against the bay; the bleeding sunrise from the plane window… It helped draw me into the present.

Looking became a new delight, as if I had been using my eyes for my whole life without ever really seeing. And then words — always so important to me — had become the vehicle to calm; the way to express what the imagination could see, and mingle it with what my mind could perceive.

As I grew up and learnt to write and draw, words became the mode of expression for my imagination. I always had the wildest stories — I was both a genius and my own worst enemy, because the results of my boundless imagination were endless epics. I rarely succeeded at writing good short stories because the ending always needed to arrive too soon. There was too much detail, too many possibilities.

If I look back into my childhood, the deepest dreams I had all centred around stories and imagination: books, writing, creating something from nothing. So when did it stop? Perhaps to many it seems like I never stopped. But something happened along the way, that happens to most of us when we put our childhood dreams to one side.

I began to know self-consciousness, criticism and other people’s subjective likes and dislikes. I came to think that perhaps there could be bad ideas, that imagination was not a talent or a gift but a thing to be kept in check. I forgot my creativity and forgot who I was. I got lost in the world, attempting creativity but only as half myself — an imposter.

As humans, imagination is something we’re told to pack away with our story books, to paste into a photo album and only take out once a year at best. We’re supposed to put it away and journey on with life. To grow into adulthood is to grow into reality, to become more solid and made of matter.

Strangely enough, the moment I re-inhabited what I now believe to be my true identity, I re-inhabited my ability to imagine, create and explore. It’s like there’s a door in my soul that is being gradually opened.

And now I realise that imagination, ideas and creativity — they’re not the realm of children. They don’t make our edges less defined but they make them stronger; they colour us in and they fill us up. Ideas can’t be bad, because they’re only ideas. If imagination is checked then it isn’t imagination at all. If creativity is prevented then it ceases to be itself.

As a Christian, I believe I was created by the ultimate Creator. I was designed by the most intelligent designer; imagined by the most boundless imaginer. I was an idea in the mind of history’s greatest innovator before I was even an embryo in my mother’s womb. I believe that I was wonderfully and fearfully made, knit together in my mother’s womb by God. And I also believe that God created each one of us in his image. And if that is true, then it makes us creators, designers, imaginers and innovators too; it means that we fully reflect God when we inhabit our identity as creators.

To deny this is to deny our Creator, to say that we think less of the innate gifts, traits and talents he has lovingly bestowed on us.

So, I am taking my imagination back — and my story books too.

Every day, we walk past hundreds of people with no idea of who they are or what incredible stories they have to tell. This is a story about what happens when you decide it’s time to stop and find out more.

Peter.

Peter Nichols is a collector as much as he is a barber: a collector of memories, memorabilia, faces, haircuts and good yarns. He is a raconteur and thermostat for public opinion and popular topics, from politics to football — he can tell you what Melbourne is talking about better than any newspaper.

But most of all, he’s a curator of people. “Some of them like to chat, some are a bit quiet — you take them one at a time,” he says of his customers.

He’s had his Barber’s Shop on Little Lonsdale street for 23 years. It is sandwiched between a car park and printing business, up the road from 1000£ Bend and across from a brand new housing development.

Peter says the neighbourhood may have changed, but people and hairstyles for the most haven’t.

Trends come in cycles: from the short-back-and-sides to the longer styles championed by The Beatles and back again. The difference is that Peter was doing it the first time around in 1966 when he first become an apprentice at a Barber’s shop in Caufield.

He bought his Little Lonsdale street premises from a barber named Bernie Harry: “an old sailor; an old war dog” whose sign still sits in the front window. Peter remembers clearly the day he first saw the Barber’s shop: his wife had parked outside, and he said to her: “now that’s the kind of Barber’s Shop I want to run.”

A few years later he found out Bernie was selling up. “When I said, ‘I want it for a Barber’s Shop’, he shook my hand. So, I bought it off him.”

For the most part, the shop remains as it was; just a lick of paint and some new memorabilia. On the walls are photos of his father on horseback; riding memorabilia — a boot, reins, a saddle bag; three old records; a photo of The Rat Pack; a signed cricket bat; an Angry Birds clock.

The antique cash register and barber’s chair still have pride of place, while the newspapered floor was one of Peter’s additions. Copies of the Sun-Pictorial depict news from the 30s (war in the Pacific) all the way up to the 80s (Prince Charles marries Diana).

His favourite part of his job the people: “just hearing their stories — you laugh and joke about it. Some barristers tell me what cases they’re doing… Next time they come in for a haircut [I ask], you know, ‘how did it go?’”

In almost 50 years as a barber, Peter seems to have met someone from every layer of society, “from students, to barristers, to high court judges, federal police; some bikies.”

He cuts hair for Peter Morrissey (defendant for Myran Sukamaran and Andrew Chan of the Bali 9) as well as a “lovely old guy” who has done 32 Melbourne to Hobart Yacht races in a row, and men from Moe, Hastings, Ballarat, Woodend.

Some have been coming to him for 10, 17, 20, even 23 years. Some come every ten days for a trim, while others leave an entire year between cuts. He takes genuine interest in each of their lives.

His mantra as a barber is simple: “treat people the way you’d like to be treated, give ‘em what they want, make sure they’re happy.”

Video & photos by the ever-talented Eve Byers.

Story by me.

This story originally appeared on The Colour Eve.

Dear girl,

When I saw your picture, a small door in my heart opened; one I’d never noticed before. I felt the mustard seed of joy I’d been keeping safe tingle slightly in anticipation. I swear I felt it grow a little.

You see, this past week I haven’t been feeling so good. I can’t really explain why — whether it’s chemical, genetic, or something that’s just mine. But today, while you were being born, I slowly came back to life.

Dear girl, I wish you’ll go through life overflowing with joy. You’re so perfect and at peace right now — I would give the whole world for you to stay that way: unblemished, unharmed; just a pure arrangement of love in its fleshy human form. But none of us knows what will happen to you, and all of us know your whole life can’t be happy.

I wish you’ll go through life not making any of the mistakes I made. Maybe when you’re older, I’ll tell you what they were just to keep you from trouble. But none of us knows what choices you’ll make, and all of us know your whole life can’t be one perfect decision after another. No one ever found themselves while they were doing everything right — mistakes are what make us.

I hope you’ll know how dearly you’re loved; how dearly you were always loved, even before you arrived, gasping for air and heaving with the hopeful promise of future days yet unlived. Dear girl, be quick to fill your own heart with love, ready to pour that love out to all — but slow to give that heart away.

The world will tell you a lot of things — that you should be this, or you should be that — but don’t ever bother listening. Only listen to those who love you; and above all trust in God. He knows every heartbeat; every word and every silence. He knows you and loves you, and will never ever leave you. So even when you feel like you’ve been left all alone, I promise it’s not the case. He’s there, just waiting for you to turn and put your hand in His, and to lead you on the way.

Dear girl, it won’t always be easy — in fact, some days will be really hard. Sometimes it’ll hurt like hell, and at other times threaten to explode with happiness. Sometimes life won’t make sense at all; won’t feel like anything much at all. One thing is for sure: it’s a mistake to think life should be like this or like that — that it should only be one thing; or that it should always be happy. Life isn’t always happy, and it’s certainly never just one thing. Each day has its own colour, and each season has its end. A life isn’t a life if it’s not coloured in, whether it’s dark one day and bright the next.

Dear girl, you might feel the need to be this or that, to do certain things or find out exactly who you are. Don’t worry — the moment you admit you’re lost is the moment you’re found; the moment you realise you’re off course is the moment you can start to get back on track. But dear girl, all the rewards and paths and dreams the world can offer you will only offer you a small slice of happiness. Don’t be deceived: trust in what you know you can. God will always be perfect — but He’ll never ask you to be perfect.

Now, let me tell you one last secret — one that took me a while to find out. Life isn’t about being perfect, being someone, being successful, being desirable, being what everyone else says you should be, or being anything at all. Life is all about love, given wisely, purely and true.

So most of all dear girl: remember you are loved. If you’re like me, for most of your life that won’t mean much at all. Then it’ll start to mean more and more til you realise that actually, it’s everything.

I.

There are moments — like when you lie on your back and stare too far up into the sky — when you realise the absurdity of being.

It’s like seeing through a crack in a wall that no one meant you to see; a giant, cosmic secret (or joke) that you’ve only just caught the fringes of. You laugh along so everyone thinks you got the joke too — but secretly you’re wondering what happened.

I have that moment sometimes when I’m by myself — in a crowd or alone in the dark, in my hometown or somewhere halfway across the world. I am conscious — as if for the very first time — of the connection between my mind and my body; how that body is the only one I do and shall ever have. I will never have the luxury of stepping outside it and inside someone else; I will never be anything but exactly what and who I am — though that may change over time.

And yet, each of us has within us a secret desire to be known — to others, and to ourselves. But the only person we will ever truly know is ourselves and the only head we will ever be inside is our own. It’s a frightening and lonely thought: to be trapped in this one body for eternity, never thinking with another voice nor seeing with another pair of eyes.

You are only you and that is all.

It’s when I think in these patterns that I feel as if I’ve seen through the crack in the wall. I can’t see much and it’s mostly light and shade and colours and shapes — but still, the crack is there and there’s something going on behind it, which is proof enough in itself.

But proof of what, you ask?

Proof that there are questions to be asked, and thus, answers to be sought.

II.

If I am me and that is all, then who am I to everyone else?

In today’s world, the answer is: the exact person I want to be.

But the more we share the idea or image of ourselves everywhere there is a place to share — online; in our conversation; in conversations of others — the less we become who we truly are. There is no room for error, for stumbled words or awkward twitches, for vulnerability, for unexpected twists and turns, for serendipity.

With more opportunities to ‘edit’ we become less of who we really are.

We’re individual, flawed, messy, incongruous beings; acutely aware of our desires, dreams and fears as much as we are our own fingertips.

But the mess, the imperfections, errors and mistakes are what makes life — and in turn, they are what makes us.

III.

Sometimes I want to tell you — just tell you — what I’m thinking. How when I look at you I see much more than two, blinking eyes on a face and a mouth forming sentences.

Sometimes when we speak, I can see the same cogs whirring in your head that are whirring through mine; cogs trying to form phrases and ask questions and keep the conversation moving. Cogs that are ready to conk out under the stress that maybe we’re not really connecting as easily as we’d hoped; that the distance between my head and yours is too far.

I see past that.

In you, I see an intensity of feeling — a passion for life, for doing things well and giving your all to each moment. I see talent and drive, but also an earthiness and realism that I admire.

You’re blessed with many gifts, and with love; with friends and family. And I like that you can see that, and don’t take anything for granted.

I want to tell you because we never see these things when we look at ourselves in the mirror; when we’re plodding around in our own lonely, fleshy bodies, suspended in our own lonely, heavy minds. We underestimate the best things about ourselves and overestimate the worst things about ourselves. We’ve convinced ourselves we’re unlovable and unknowable. But the people who love us, or even simply the people who know us, will always see the brilliance we miss.

Love is the connector; it’s the two cups with string between; the oft-missed link in the middle of two lonely minds. If we reach out, we reach out to close the gap.

So why are we so afraid to offer the connection if we’re so afraid of being alone? If we only want to be known, why don’t we offer to close the gap more often? We’re afraid of being honest — even if it’s a kindness; afraid of helping people to see their real value.

Just ask me, and I’ll tell you, one lonely head to another, that I can see the world in you.

And, should I have the choice, I’d keep you exactly the way you are.

In a way, this story is an introduction to something bigger.

Though I wrote this a while ago, just yesterday I started #the100dayproject. My 100 days from yesterday until July will be filled with me writing down the things I like, love, appreciate and admire about the people in my life.

Here’s how I started my project on Instagram yesterday:

• Today I'm starting #the100dayproject dreamed up by the ever-inspiring @elleluna and the @greatdiscontent. The idea is to commit to 100 days of making! I've chosen to write at least one thing I love or admire (be it a sentence, a paragraph or an entire epic) about someone I know each day for 100 days. Why? Because I think the world could be kinder, that it's important to teach ourselves to see the best in everyone, and that most people only ever see the worst in ourselves. Oh, and I know some pretty amazing humans who deserve to be told they're the best. At the end of the 100 days, I might choose to send what I've written to the people I've written about... But for now, it's writing time. Time for #100daysoffriends (or encouragement, or appreciation, or warm fuzzies!). @byers_eve @claireytee
• The first person included in my #100daysoffriends project is @smilingwithlove - 20% because she asked me to write her a letter to feature in her own art project, and 80% because she's wonderful. #letters #the100dayproject #tgd #goodvibes #warmfuzzy @greatdiscontent @elleluna #vscocam

I’ll be writing about one person each day, and at the end of the 100 days, I may even choose to send what I’ve written to those people.

In many ways, this whole project was inspired by a video by SoulPancake. Although the title of the video is ‘The Single Life’, it has more to do with honesty, appreciation and seeing the bigger and better things in life than anything else.

The video made me want to be more honest with the people I care about, but also everyone in general. You know, those people you meet for a few hours who you think are fantastic, but they’ll probably never know? Or, those people you see every week or every day at work, at the cafe around the corner, at church, in your sporting team… You think they’re awesome, but they have no idea you even gave them a second thought.

Don’t they deserve to know?

I started a list yesterday of some of the people I wanted to write for. Some will be easy, while others will be more difficult.

I’ve deliberately inserted some people who mean (or have meant) a great deal to me — they represent a significant time in my life, but it may not have been an entirely positive one. I’m excited for the challenge of changing my own perceptions about the people around me, as much as I am about saying the things that are good and true about them.

So in short: I think the world could be kinder, that it’s important to teach ourselves to see the best in everyone, and that most people only ever see the worst in ourselves.

Oh, and I know some pretty amazing humans who deserve to be told they’re the best.

#100daysoffriends

What Joan Didion and piles of notebooks have taught me about life.

It was in a corner classroom; high up in the John Medley building, the west tower. The walls there were a calming but clammy shade of faded orange; the tables made of light wood. The whole setting seeped 1970s academia.

I think it was in this classroom, in my Creative Non-Fiction class, that I first read Joan Didion’s ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ — a section of her acclaimed book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It’s a must-read for all would-be writers, long-serving wordsmiths and generally thoughtful people.

If you’ve ever found yourself musing on the hidden meaning behind anything in life, ever, chances are you’ve tried to keep a notebook.

My room is a haven for dust-infused notebooks large and small; brightly-coloured, grey, black, and somewhere in between. Half are scrapbooks filled with torn magazine pages; the rest are filled with stories interjected by financial plans and to-do lists.

My favourite notebooks are the ones that record a painful snapshot of my life in every selfish detail. The red notebook is my first year of University; the first boy I ever really loved; my first real interaction with death.

I’ve always had a compulsion to write things down. It exists in tandem with the frustration that my words will never be enough to capture the essence of what I wish to communicate.

As Joan says so well: “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.”

And so she continues:

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

Was I child afflicted with some presentiment of loss? Am I an anxious malcontent? My mother always did say “you feel everything so much”. But what does that even mean?

Sometimes I think maybe I truly am frivolous — a weaker brand of human because of my predilection to pour each innermost thought onto paper. I’m addicted to the sensation of catharsis. I crave its rushing waves of realisation and poignancy.

I’m always waiting for the next story, for my story: the one I’ll bother to sit down and tell. Until then, I find my life too trivial, too similar to everyone else’s. But maybe that’s exactly what it needs to be. Sometimes, it’s nice simply knowing that other people share your seemingly irrational, or mind-bending insecurities and fears. As soon as you know that you’re not unique in a way that is utterly frightening, the world becomes much smaller; much easier to live in.

Maybe my story is that I’m just the same as you — no more special, no more talented, no less insecure, and no longer alone. As Joan says, in my writing I “remember what it was to be me”, and thus, what it is to any unspectacular one of us.