Clarity Is Overrated — Embrace Not Knowing
Accept that you will never have the answers.
The chill of a winter morning as an alarm clock.
I woke up at 7 am and swung my legs out of bed, and stepped onto the hardwood. Curling deeper into my hoodie, I tried not to let any of the cold sink in. After brushing my teeth, grabbing a coffee, and straightening up my desk, I settled back in my room for a day of online lectures and assignments.
Once in a while, my eyes would wander around the room as if shocked anew by the emptiness as I listened to my classmates try their best to communicate through a bad Wi-Fi connection. Often, I would abandon my focus altogether, tired from the strain of forcing interest and concentration, and grab my phone, scrolling to try to find something interesting to ease the relentless monotony of the day.
More often, I would end up in a daze, staring out of my bedroom window for hours, imagining hundreds of potential lives I could be living as if to torture myself.
Even more often than that, I would end up laying on my bed, eyes tracing the cracks in the ceiling to try to calm a racing heart.
This was my routine for eight months.
I could describe this routine in greater length and paint an even more vivid picture. I could describe the concrete, grey emptiness that pervaded it. I could talk about nausea, the dizziness, the obsession with tarot cards to try to find some brightness in my future to compensate for the total lack of joy I had in the present — the inability to eat, the tears on the kitchen floor calling my parents.
It would be for naught; I will never be able to relay the feelings accurately. I will never be able to explain all of the complicated overlaps between my mental health and how it affected my life and relationships. All of the intricate threads tying together every belief, thought, conviction, struggle, and feeling inside me are all interwoven, affecting each other and creating layer upon layer of emotional sediment.
The experience, my feelings, my mind would never be able to be wholly understood or seen, just as I will never be able to fully understand the feelings of someone else’s experience during the pandemic or at any other time.
Human experiences are not clear or easy to navigate.
Every day is a succession of new experiences, all vying for time to be processed, appreciated, and understood.
Clarity is rare, and when a breakthrough happens, something clicks, and a burden is lifted and gone; it is often called a miracle.
More often than not, hard work is put into choosing battles wisely and delving into the tangled depth of ourselves, attempting to solve and work out what is most important. Clarity does come, and when it does, I welcome it because it’s what I strive to find. I’ve realized, though, that there is something even more important and attainable than clarity, acceptance.
Acceptance transcends clarity. You may not have it all figured out, but you can accept where you are right now. You may not understand your experiences, and maybe you never will, but you can accept how you are feeling and how life is affecting you and work to understand all that you can. Ultimately, acceptance brings peace.
There is a word I deeply love; sonder. It means “the realization that each person is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
I know that I will never be able to untangle all of the threads of myself and make sense of it; still less would I be able to wholly grasp the intricacies and nuances of another person. What I can do is be there for myself and others.
Accept that we are all equally complicated to unreachable depths, and put in the effort to love, support, and have patience and grace. I will never understand everything that happens or why it happens, but I can accept where I am right now in my journey, have peace, and learn and understand more today than yesterday.
I am so thankful that I could go to therapy, make the hard decision to take a break from school, and move home to a supportive and loving family.
I wake up in the mornings now and look at the sun glisten and shine over the water, and thank God for a new day, for a heart like a rubber band, for hands to hold when things aren’t perfect, and for peace when clarity is unattainable. So, let’s stop pressuring ourselves to find clarity in every experience and stop resenting others for being unable to understand.
Let’s accept.
