It’s often the case in the long history of human thought that distinct voices — separated by centuries, cultures, and their entire understanding of the world — come together in a choir, singing the same melody of truth. These moments are precious, and we should listen.

So, John, I’ve been thinking… my friend goes to this book club that I think you should get in on. And, here’s the deal, they’ve been doing the same book for years, and I think that if they did your book for the same amount of time it would be really good. They call it “church,” and…

That’s how episode 409 of Dear Hank & John starts — a podcast hosted by brothers Hank (novelist and all-around internet science guy) and John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars and Everything Is Tuberculosis). During the episode, titled The No Bummer Sleep Spectacular, they answer questions from their listeners while trying — very importantly — to stay clear of bummers — which they do poorly.

In one of their trademark existential tangents, John says, “we all know love survives death because we all love someone who’s died,” and Hank jokingly attributes it to the book of Ecclesiastes. John, the more Bible-literate of the two, corrects him, and gives us an insight into the Old Testament book. He says:

The banger of Ecclesiastes 12 is Ecclesiastes 12:8: “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says The Teacher. ‘Everything is meaningless!’”

Hank laughs and says, “I’d get that one tattooed on me.”

“Let me tell you why you’re here,” Morpheus says in the classic blue pill/red pill scene in The Matrix (1999). “You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

John and Hank’s conversation about Ecclesiastes also put a splinter in my mind. There was something ancient and true in The Teacher’s words — not in a religious way, but in a way that seems to describe some deep and undeniable truth about our universe and, ultimately, about ourselves. It’s like instead of simply walking down the halls of the Matrix, he was reading the code that made up the walls themselves.

I didn’t remember ever reading Ecclesiastes — despite my church years — but something still sounded deeply familiar. And so, before I could even choose to do it, my ADHD brain started rummaging through my mind in search of that damn splinter.

In my signature fashion, I first landed on something linked to The Matrix: Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulation, the book that, in many ways, inspired the movie. Coincidentally, Baudrillard opens the book misquoting Ecclesiastes:

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
— Ecclesiastes

Good ol’ Baudrillard. The quote is obviously fake, a simulacrum itself: a copy without an original, a representation of a truth that has no connection to truth itself. It’s a prank — quite a brilliant one — and when I first read it, I fell for it. But despite Hank also misquoting Ecclesiastes, the splinter wasn’t Baudrillard’s doing.

It was “driving me mad,” so I kept searching. I decided to explore how much of a downer Ecclesiastes was and, let me tell you, it’s bad. But while roaming that minefield of bummers, I found another passage that sounded deeply and universally true.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
— Ecclesiastes 1:18

Damn.

From the English “ignorance is bliss,” to the German “aus den Augen, aus dem Sinn” (out of sight, out of mind), to the Portuguese “o que os olhos não vêem, o coração não sente” (what the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t feel), many languages and thinkers throughout history have arrived at this same conclusion.

In my early twenties, I preemptively committed to Hank’s bit about getting a tattoo. I inked on my arm, “Being conscious is a torment,” as said by Dutch metal band, Epica, in their song Sensorium. The lyrics go on to mirror The Teacher’s words: “The more we learn, the less we get” — “the more knowledge, the more grief.”

Maybe the more we understand the universe, the more we find there’s no ultimate meaning for any of it. Things happen because they happen, because of what happened before. And we happen in the same way, because of the ones that happened before us. The more we learn about the world, the more it challenges the idea of the divine. And when gods die, so does meaning.

Then, the more news we consume, the more pain we see. The more we learn about our societies, our systems, and our flaws, the less it seems its worth to even try and improve them. The harder we try, the worse things seems to get.

But if that’s the case, what’s even the point? And sure, maybe that’s the point. But still, if the point is that there is no point, then what’s even the point?

And there it was, smirking at me. The splinter.

The Bible, The Buddha, and Absurdism

One is a preacher from ancient Israel — clearly recovering from depression — writing sacred scrolls in the name of the god Yahweh. The second is a playboy-turned-hippie from the foothills of India, teaching detachment from desire through meditation. The third is a Frenchman in the 20th century, living on a diet of cigarettes and pondering suicide.

Despite their differences, these three looked at the human condition and arrived at the same disheartening conclusion: life is meaningless — as established, a bummer.

In the age of anxiety, you might arrive at the same conclusion. But these three thinkers, like many others throughout history, offer evidence of humanity’s beautiful — if inevitable — love for life. They all used the best logic and the wisdom of their times to find reasons to live — to hope.

Their words may offer some wisdom. And so I listen.

Life Is Meaningless

As by this point you’ve realized, the book of Ecclesiastes, in the Old Testament, is a major bummer. Throughout the book, “the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem,” passionately argues that everything humans do in life is meaningless, “a chasing after the wind.”

In quest for meaning, he tries “cheering himself with wine,” “undertaking great projects,” and “amassing silver and gold,” among many other distractions. Every time, he finds it to be “meaningless” — he even calls it “madness.”

After embracing the pursuit of wisdom for a while, he says, “The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise? […] This too is meaningless.” A clear sign of depression, if I may say so myself.

After pointing out the “madness” of it all — or perhaps, its absurdity, oui, oui — he finally decides to look through the walls of bummers and concludes:

I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad.

What a plot twist!

That, too, by the way, sounds French. Thousands of years later philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau would argue that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” and that returning to a simpler, more natural way of living, — away from society’s vanity, pride, and social games — is the only way to reclaim our freedom and to truly be happy. Maybe there’s some truth to the old cliché of enjoying the small things in life.

In his conclusion, The Teacher adds that one should “find enjoyment in his toil” and, because this is the Bible, “fear God and keep his commandments.”

Even if the very last bit doesn’t quite seduce me, enjoying life — eating and drinking and being glad, and enjoying what you do — sounds like a pretty reasonable way to deal with a meaningless life.

A personally don’t believe in God — not anymore — so I was impressed that I could actually relate to the Bible like that.

It sounds contradictory that the Bible can offer lessons to an atheist. How can a book so intrinsically reliant on the idea of God have anything God-less to say? But the Bible is a book. Divinely inspired or not, it was written by humans and for humans. Like any book, it gives us insights on how humans perceive themselves. And so I listen.

Besides, The Teacher wasn’t the only one to diagnose life’s meaninglessness. In ancient India, another great thinker was arriving at a similar conclusion, but giving it his own twist.

Life Is Dukkha

Around five centuries before Christ gave his first leftist speech, prince Siddhartha Gautama was experiencing an early-onset midlife-crisis that would go down in history. After a life of comfort, shielded from the outside world, Siddhartha, at age 29, stepped out of the palace — and of Plato’s proverbial cave, wink wink — and saw the world for what it was. A world filled with pain and suffering. In one word, a bummer.

It was a deeply traumatizing ordeal for him. He was so confounded by the horrors of life that he decided to give up his royal comforts and become ancient India’s version of a hippie. He became a monk and, as such, he decided to sit under a tree and meditate… forever, I guess?

For forty days and forty nights, he sat under the Bodhi tree, surviving on either seeds brought by birds or offers brought by villagers, depending on your worldview. He was also either tempted by Mara, “the demon of illusions,” or had some crazy hallucinations, again, depending on your worldview.

And in the morning of the forty-first day, I suppose, Siddhartha transcended! He saw the code on the walls of the Matrix. He achieved nirvana — not to be confused with the politically enlightened band from the early nineties.

Siddhartha — now, the Buddha — understood the inherent nature of the human condition. He realized: life is dukkha.

Often translated as “suffering,” dukkha is more than physical pain. It’s the unsatisfactoriness of existence. It’s the longing for something that is not. It’s an intrinsic consequence of being human. As he was fed by birds/villagers — DOYW — under the Bodhi tree, this was his thinking:

Everything exists in dualities — the two sides of a coin. If light exists, its absence — darkness — also does. If darkness didn’t exist, light would be a constant of the universe, and the concept of light would become useless. Right?

That is, there can’t be light if there isn’t something that is not light.

I guess that sounds reasonable.

So Siddharta goes on to conclude that one can only be happy (satisfied) if one can also be unhappy (dissatisfied). Light only exists if its absence — darkness — also does. So satisfaction can only exist if its absence — dukkha— also does. Even when we do get satisfied, that satisfaction soon goes away, which makes dukkha a permanent feature of life.

To put simply:

I can’t get no
satisfaction!” — The Rolling Stones

Now, ain’t that the truth, Mr. Jagger? Ain’t that the truth?

Darwin would agree, by the way. Nature — the physics of our universe — selected beings that wanted things. It’s not like the ones who didn’t want anything really made an effort to survive.

And so we want food, because if we didn’t we’d be ded. Add that to our buffed brains, and you get a being that wants yesterday’s dessert as today’s lunch. Things become normal — old, outdated — and so we get hungry again.

As Yuval Noah Harari puts it in Sapiens, “One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities.” Which is why The Teacher became so mad. The impermanence of satisfaction makes its pursuit meaningless.

But where The Teacher proposed to face meaninglessness by eating and drinking and being glad, the Buddha proposed that we try and eliminate desire itself. If we give up the pleasures of life, we also give up the suffering that comes from not having them.

And, because this is Buddhism, if we do that, we’ll level up in the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth, and get closer and closer to the upper tiers and, perhaps, become gods — which, for me, is like the galaxy brain meme but with spiritual stakes.

Although the last bit doesn’t quite fit my personal cosmology, Siddhartha’s insights about the human nature are incredibly timeless. It’s not a religious observation, it’s a biological one.

And when you internalize this cycle of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, rolling stones up a hill only to see them roll down again, it will really feel like a chasing after the wind; like madness. It feels absurd.

Life Is Absurd

It’s 1942, and World War II is, once again, redrawing the maps of Europe. French bad boy novelist, Albert Camus, has recently moved from the African side of the Mediterranean where he was a journalist, in French Algeria. He now lives in Paris, feeds not on seeds but on cigarette smoke, and he writes. He has recently published a novel about a man who doesn’t feel anything, neither when his mom dies nor when he ends up shooting someone dead, and is now writing a philosophical essay about one central question: why not commit suicide.

Out of all bummers so far, I personally think Camus takes the prize.

However! Much like the Green brothers, Camus tried his best to leave bummers aside, and he took the question as an intellectual quest, focusing on logical and philosophical arguments. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he says:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

In his view, if the answer to, “is life worth living?” is “no,” then we don’t even need to ask any other questions. It’s like one of those questionnaires where, if you answer “no” to the first question, you don’t have to answer any of the others.

And so in analyzing if life is worth living — from a philosophical standpoint — he got to the inherent human need for meaning. We’re hungry not only for food and water, but for recognition, for purpose. For meaning.

If we ask ourselves why we do things, and keep asking it, we’ll inevitably run out of answers. The deeper we go, the more things seem to lose… meaning. As Camus puts it:

It happens that the stage sets the collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Amen to that, Camus. Amen to that.

If running out of meaning causes so much pain, we have to be like toddlers pulling the skirts of philosophy, and ask: why is it so painful? And the answer isn’t that hard. It hurts when we lack meaning for the same reason it hurts when we lack food. It’s our nature. It’s what worked for us so far.

For Camus, this need for meaning in a universe without it is the absurd. As he puts it:

The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

What Camus calls the absurd is part of what Buddhism calls dukkha and Ecclesiastes calls madness. They all knew it, though they used different words. Who can blame them? They lived in completely different worlds. And yet, they all agreed. Life is, as it appears, meaningless.

But Albert Camus was French, and he would never let this go without a bloody revolution. He refuses to bow to meaninglessness. He gives it the middle finger. He says:

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

What is it with French people? Why are you the way you are, mesdames et messieurs?

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tells the tale of the title character. After cheating death itself — impressive! — Sisyphus is sentenced by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down, forever. And ever. And ever.

For Camus, Sisyphus was the personification of life’s meaninglessness — in my eyes, the personification of dukkha and madness. But he proposes that Sisyphus shouldn’t reject the absurdity of it, he should embrace it with awareness — with mindfulness(!). And by becoming mindful of dukkha, by seeing the code on the walls of the Matrix, Sisyphus could perhaps find enjoyment in his toil. As Camus says:

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Sounds reasonable. And so I listen.

I don’t know what’s the appropriate response to the meaninglessness and the absurdity of existence, but I’m always mesmerized by the human capacity to even know about it!

I mean, I don’t think dogs ponder the meaning of life. Cats for sure don’t — they’re absurdists by heart. They couldn’t care less about meaning. The point is, puppies and kittens don’t have a name for light, and they don’t have a name for darkness.

I don’t know, man! Sometimes is bright and sometimes is dark. It’s all crazy all the time. Sometimes I bark and I don’t even know why! Anyway, I just really LOVE when I get the thing that makes the hungies go away, especially the ones that chew good. Whatever you do, just don’t go in the kitchen.
 — a dog, probably

For dogs — and any other animal, for that matter — things don’t exist in dualities, but in a continuum. There is no light and darkness. There’s just… the world. And for as fun as it is to imagine a dog making the speech above, they would never have said any of it. They can’t.

But we can. And that’s it.

We have this amazing ability to create models in our minds, mental maps of the real world that we can then study to navigate the real world. We name things.

Dog. Cat. Light. Darkness. Good. Evil. Life. Madness. Dukkha. Absurdity.

And meaning, and love, and happiness, and wisdom, and cooperation.

Surviving. Thriving.

We have named all these things. And for that, I love humans. I’m passionate about us.

So it makes me sad that we’ve been falling for so many traps, old and new, from fascism to social media. We see the world through the internet, and like in Baudrillard’s map that ends up replacing the territory, we take the simulacrum for the real world. We’re lied to. We are fed false information through systems that optimize their delivery.

Like in Plato’s cave, we’re chained to the walls, seeing the world through shadows. That is, until we leave the pleasures of the palace, let go of the world of illusions, disconnect from the Matrix. If we do that, we will achieve nirvana and read the code that makes up the walls. Maybe, like in a video game, the walls are only visible from one side, and once we’re outside, we’ll be able to see that.

For that, I have hope in humans. With awareness, compassion, and wisdom, we can be better. I know it.

And maybe that’s where I find meaning in a meaningless universe. I find meaning in being passionate about humans, and I find meaning in telling you about it. You deserve to know how beautiful we are.

Maybe meaning lives in our instinct to cooperate. As social beings, we survive in communities. Not alone, but together. It’s human nature. If I help you and you help me, we have a higher chance of making it. And so nature selected us into leaving our small tribes in the past, as we evolved into a highly connected international society, depending on trade and, yes, cooperation, for our survival.

I find meaning in having hope that things can be better, and convincing you to share that hope is the Sisyphean boulder I chose to push. I’m just some guy, and the world is always throwing new stuff at us. The boulder constantly rolls back down the hill. But even as I see the madness, the suffering, and the absurdity of the task, everything I’ve learned tells me: I must imagine Sisyphus happy.

And so I listen.

The Splinter was originally published in The Grotto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rory Stewart: Okay, let’s now apply this to Palestine and Israel. Let’s start with the social media. What have you observed about the way that Arabs and Palestinians receive their news and the way that Israelis receive their news, and what social media means and contributes to the way that this conflict is understood and perceived?

Francesca Albanese: Rory, I’m not a media or communication expert by all means, but I can tell you that through my experience, I have the impression that we [still] live in a landscape made of echo chambers when it comes to social media. What we read and what we feed into — I speak as someone who has a public platform and voice — it’s very much determined by algorithms. And as I say “algorithm,” I talk of something that I imagine as a device that redirects, filters, or adjusts, according to certain things that are determined not by me or by those who listen to me, if you see what I mean. So I sometimes have the feeling that while in the social media, we are in the open air, at the same time there are prescribed paths, and it’s very difficult. It’s not a democratic space. So yes, there is a way to open up for communication channels that do not exist in the traditional media landscape — and I could give you specific examples of it — but at the same time my feeling is that we still speak into an echo chamber.

It’s at the very least ironic that social media is today the primary way in which the concept of free speech is debated. The two terms are, by definition, incompatible.

You already know everything I’m gonna say, but I’m gonna say it anyway. For starters, what do I mean when I say that social media and free speech are incompatible by definition?

Well, social media platforms are usually owned by private companies seeking profit. There are exceptions, of course, but, for this conversation, I’ll focus on for-profit social media platforms. I’m talking about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok, YouTube, Medium, and so on. Any platform where what we see is determined not by us, but by an algorithm designed to keep us engaged.

If social media platforms exist to generate profit, that means when calibrating their curation algorithm, one metric speaks louder than any other: will this make us more money? The company will always favor decisions that approximate the answer to a solid “yes.” That’s the business.

This we all know.

Now, what about free speech? That’s “the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint.”

So, if the opinions fed into social media are distributed according to an algorithm that prioritizes profitability, wouldn’t the algorithm, by definition, restrain some of these opinions so that others could be seen instead? How can speech ranked by profitability be truly free?

And even if the owner of a social media poses as a martyr for free speech, what happens if true free speech is not profitable? A company only stays alive if it makes money — even if that money is only prophesied, not yet materialized. Profit is the air a company breathes. Without it, it succumbs to bankruptcy.

So what will a company choose when polarization, psychological terrorism, and brain-numbing distractions are more profitable than truth itself?

You know the answer. We all know.

But at the end of the day, although this we all know, we are too tired to think or do anything about it. Our brains are tired. And so we go to social media, to relax, and somehow our brains get even more tired. It’s what happens when we abuse drugs. Social media feeds are optimized to keep us engaged because that’s what makes money. They’re addiction machines.

Yet again, this we all know.

So, once more, if this we all know, why do we… keep doing it? How do we keep falling for the same trap? I’m not talking about using social media, but about believing it and — God forbid — engaging with it. Every time a new outburst of controversy sprouts in the fertile fields of social media, the Zuckerbergs of the world admire their crops, confident that the next harvest will be bountiful. Worst of all, we are the ones doing all the backbreaking work of content creation. All to fatten the pockets of those who already have too much.

We can’t afford to let social media make the world so busy that to simply exist is too tiresome. We’re not too numbed to act. Yet.

Effecting change is not impossible, but it’s complicated — and a conversation for another time, for I, too, get tired. For now, you can take a very simple but extremely significant step that can help shift the power back to us. Whenever you’re on social media, don’t ever let yourself forget this:

Your feed was curated not for truth or for fairness, but for someone else’s profit.

On social media, no speech is or will ever be truly free, so what we consume there will never be an accurate depiction of the world. When we internalize this lesson, we can then start asking ourselves (as friend of the show Michel Foucault would eagerly remind us): “who benefits from the world being like this?”

Maybe that, too, we all know.

Thoughts From March 24th, 2025 was originally published in The Grotto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An Immigrant’s Journey

I was never a great wolf.

Not the kind that howls in unison beneath a frozen moon, leading a pack across the snow. Not the kind that rules a kingdom of ice and mountains, feared and revered in the stories of old. That was never me.

I came from the heat, from the south of Brazil where the air is thick with laughter and the smell of barbecue, where the streets are loud and full of life. There, I tried to be a vira-lata caramelo.

The street dog, the survivor. The one who thrives in chaos, who belongs everywhere and nowhere, who moves through life with an open heart and an easy tail wag. The dog of resilience, of crowded squares and warm voices, of improvisation and instinct. Those instincts were written in me, but I could only barely read them.

The vira-lata melts into any space, instinctively understanding the shifting, unspoken rules of human warmth. I, on the other hand, have always been an introvert, drawn to quiet corners, to observing more than participating. I had trouble navigating the ambiguous cues read so easily by those who truly embodied their Brazilianness. Maybe I was never the dog weaving through the market, tail wagging, making connections in every direction. Maybe I was already something else — watching, listening, waiting.

I would sit in my bedroom, at home, feeling something I couldn’t name. A longing, a weight in my chest. I would stare at the ceiling, at the walls that had always been mine, and feel foreign within them. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t know what that meant.

And then, I left.

To go north, to where the air is sharp and clean, where the streets are quiet, and the rules are printed in books instead of passed through gestures and knowing glances. I came to Canada, where the seasons truly change, where silence holds weight.

Here, wolves move carefully across the snow, their steps measured, their paths deliberate. They are strong together but distant, majestic from afar, elusive up close. I admired them, but I was not one of them.

Roaming the grasslands of metaphors, I found it, hidden in the tall grass, ears alert, listening for what the land has to offer. The lobo guará — the maned wolf, neither dog nor true wolf, caught between worlds.

The lobo guará walks alone, making meaningful connections sparsely in the vast grasslands. It does not run in packs. It does not claim the cold forests of the north, nor the bustling human streets. It roams, belonging only to the movement of its own feet. It has the long legs of someone who has stretched beyond where they came from, legs that allow it to see the treats hidden in the tall grass, overlooked but rich with nourishment. It eats both meat and fruit, because survival is about adaptation, about taking what the land offers. It is misunderstood, often defying labels.

Like the maned wolf, I have grown into something hybrid — no longer fully Brazilian, not fully Canadian either. I still carry the warmth of home in my voice, the melody of my mother tongue in my thoughts. I have learned the patience of winter, the quiet persistence of a country where time moves differently. I have built something here — work, love, a life. A home.

Because, in the end, home is something we build. And just like ourselves, it does not necessarily belong to any one place.

Yet, on some nights, I hear the echoes of the past. A street vendor’s call, the scent of rain on hot pavement, the laughter of friends who now exist only in memories and video calls. And I wonder — am I still that caramel-colored dog at heart, sniffing the air for a familiar scent? Or am I truly the lobo guará now, legs too long for my old streets, gait too different to ever fully return?

Maybe I am both.

Because if there is one thing I know I still carry from the vira-lata, it is awareness — the ability to see what others overlook. The quiet empathy of those who have lived on the edges, who have watched and understood without needing to speak. The street dog sees the homeless man and does not shrink away. It does not judge. It recognizes. It knows.

I have walked past too many people curled up in the cold, their world contained in a shopping cart, their stories buried under layers of cold silence. And every time, I feel it — that old, wordless recognition. The sense that the world has never been fair, that some are given warm homes and some are left to survive as best they can.

I was never a great wolf.

But I still drink chimarrão, still carry the bitter taste of home in my hands. And I still see people the way the vira-lata sees them — not as ghosts, not as shadows, but as people.

I have become something else, unrestrained by country fences. Not a street dog nor a great wolf, but something in between — something still shifting, still listening, still finding its place.

Lobo Guará was originally published in The Grotto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

They revolt me, my words. They were supposed to carry me out of myself and deliver that which I can’t keep inside. They failed me. They’ve become improper. Pale. Inapt.

The floodgates through which thoughts flow have become impenetrable. They block the river, and the water keeps rising, up to my neck, down my throat, and up and up.

I never learned to swim. The river would flow and I would breathe. I would bathe in it, head over water. Back then, I could romanticize the having done instead of the doing. The gates were open and doing would simply flow: wild and elusive; free. I was never able to tame it. It came and went as it wished. It has always come back to visit, however, so I learned to expect it and cherish its ephemeral stay.

I’ve tried to catch the doing many times, but I was bare-handed, and it was too slippery. Every time, it would swim away, and I was left flailing in the water.

The doing’s visits have become sparse. My words now flow in confused, conflicting currents, failing to bring me the doing.

They’ve revolted against me, my words. They mock me. They’re here, now, boasting to you. Narcissistic bastards. They always bring the doing when my thoughts are about them, but rarely when I need them otherwise. They refuse to flow in the direction I want them to. They rush hither and thither, driving me mad.

It’s not their fault, really. They’re skittish; scared. Words want to flow as much as the doing wants to swim; as much as I want to breathe the precious air I was once gifted.

The floodgates. They are the real culprits. Towering and slowly crystalizing into an unbreakable mass. They block the words and force them to stumble around in chaotic maelstroms. So now, there’s a raging sea of words and the doing is lost in its depths. I’m drowning, flailing helplessly against the current.

I close my eyes as I sink, and dream of the day when the waters will burst the gates open and flow out of me. The water will lower, and I will fill my lungs with the sweet air I’ve been craving.

They will be more manageable then, my words. They will flow out of me and away, finding their way through the world. The doing will swim free, and I will, once again, breathe.

Block was originally published in The Grotto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I wish I had them

I would love to write. I would love to use my physical hands and grab the ethereal thoughts that float on the seemingly endless seas of emotions that make up what is me, and shape them into pristine words. I wish to write down through the arbitrary symbols we chose to represent them, and show you. I wish I could share my thoughts with you, through words. I wish I knew what I wanted to say, to begin with. I wish I could strangle that shapelessness into a physical thing. I would hold it in the palm of my sweaty hands, point at it, and say, “See?”

I wish I had words. Better yet, I wish I didn’t need them, with all their side effects and unintentional meanings. Darkness is bad and light is good, but are they, really? Isn’t one merely the absence of the other, and thus both one and the same? And so how can I communicate anything at all when the only tool I have to do it is so surreptitiously addicted to trickery?

We use them daily, words. Daily. We call the span of time our planet takes to pirouette around the semi-perpetual explosion we call the Sun a day,”and so daily I wish words could help me connect to my fellow humans. I wish I could use them to describe, even to myself, the fathomless oceans of shapeless thoughts that inhabit my mind. My mind.

Me.

Who am I, really? A collection of experiences produced by the physical limitation that states two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and so I see a world only I can, because no one in the history of the universe will be able to sit here and reflect on all my past experiences while staring semi-drunk at this screen.

God bless the screen and the keys I’m pressing for they are all I have. Still I wish I had words, better words, more words. I wish again I didn’t need them, but alas boxes we need, and so we neatly place everything we perceive into a box, where it fits perfectly — never mind the things that don’t fit the boxes; never mind the abstractiveness and uniqueness of human perception. If I love and so do you, we must feel the same exact emotion. Love must be the same for both of us because the book where we list words — where we use words to describe themselves — says so. A dictionary, we call that book. And under the entry for love there’s a description, and so every human being who has ever used that word to describe their feelings must feel the exact same emotion. There is only one word to describe both your love and mine, and thus, if the word is the same, the feeling must also be. Never mind the uniqueness of our experiences and the futility of describing them through words.

I love you. That much you understand.

You know I: that’s who’s writing. And you know you: that’s who’s reading. And you know love. You know your love and you call it love, so you must, therefore, also know my love, for I also call it love. If the word is the same, once more, the feeling must also be. Never mind that when we say “I love” and “you love,” we have different words for you and I. Our love is the same.

Never mind words — especially mine. Never mind what I have to say. I don’t even know what that is. All I know is it wants to come out — to burst out, painfully — and in the lack of proper means to describe it, I find myself perpetually accompanied by a feeling familiar to me — a good friend — one I might try and describe with the word loneliness.

Good old words. One must love them.

Thank you, words, for allowing me to tell the human being reading you — another consciousness perceiving the world from a different point in space from which I do; one I could never inhabit — that I love them.

Them. He, she. Who cares? These are just words and not the thing I love. I love the person they represent. I love you, reader. I love that you perceive the universe from a different point in space — and time. I love your uniqueness. If I didn’t, how could I love mine? I wouldn’t go as far as to say I love myself — I sometimes catch myself feeling that one ugly emotion we describe with a word opposite to love, although I’ve been getting better at preventing myself from bathing in self-hatred — but I have to admit that every second I decide to stay alive and experience this universe — experience you experiencing this universe — I must love myself; or at least my perception of existence.

I am, clearly, just rambling, which is another word familiar to me: rambling. I have to use it every time I indulge in listening to my thoughts and trying to use the flawed gift of words to describe them, so that I acknowledge that perceiving my thoughts from the outside — reading them just now — must be overwhelming and confusing.

Forgive me. I’m rambling. I do it a lot. I ramble.

So you see how that word has a negative connotation? Can you see the side effects trickling through the letters? I taste their bitterness daily. That is, every time the sun is in the sky and then it’s not. And then it’s there again, and I’m still rambling and tasting the putrid flavor of self-judgment.

A social being is what I am, hardwired to belong. So what do you do when you don’t? What do you feel?

What I feel is the need to explain myself; explain my own perception. And so, back I go to my chest of words, and I take a long look at them. They seem insufficient, but they’re all I have.

Please, oh god Chaos — random statistical chance; the one force who can choose what exists and what doesn’t — don’t leave me without words, for I hate them, and without them, I’d have nothing to hate, and I’d have nothing to feel. Nothing but the love for perceiving my world and perceiving others perceiving their world and perceiving me perceiving them. That’s all there is, in the end: perception.

There is no I; there is no you. There’s just perception. And yet here I am, nonexistent. And there you are, joining me in clutching to words and hoping we can use the same ones to internalize we are all the same. After all, we use the same words, so we must have the same exact experience of being what we decided to call a human.

Thank you for words, oh lord Chaos. Thank you for allowing me to exist and not fit in. Thank you for loneliness. Thank you for hate. Thank you for existence and perception and consciousness. But most of all, thank you for words. I hate them, and they hate me back. But without them, I’m alone.

Glances Touch

Words was originally published in The Grotto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.