I'm not trying to be understood

I am unfinished. There are thoughts of mine that don’t seem as if they belong to other thoughts that churn in my mind. I’ve said things that I have later unsaid. I do things that don’t correlate with other parts of me. I enjoy the experience of so much that this life offers, that they don’t all make sense as a whole. I’m not trying to be understood.

I escort aphids on my hand until I can lay them down in some wall barley. I cry when my router malfunctions and at the thought of how many birds die by flying into windows. I get overwhelmed by the scale of human waste, and shops still thrill me beyond belief. I try to eat fries at least thrice a week and while my entire life including my career is centred around connecting to and being of service to people, sometimes I see people doing things and just think, what an absolute dickhead. I’m not trying to be understood.

I don’t want anyone to make assumptions out of me. Forcing me into a static and stagnant existence. I don’t want to be beholden to things I once said or did. I want to flow. I want to be defined only by self. I want to live in a mystery of my own making, where I’m not trying to be understood, or given a few sentences to describe me in a dictionary.

I want to be free to create and re-create myself over and over again. I want to fly beyond any perceptions of me. I refuse to live up to anyone’s mistaken perceptions of me. I find it hard to say what I do in a succinct bio and elevator pitch, because how do you describe the entirety of someone’s being in mere characters. My existence is vast, I don’t want to reduce it.

I can’t live in the weighty shoulds of expectations. I care not for over-explaining my choices, and instead allowing “Because I want to” or “I don’t want to”, to be the beginning and end of a sentence. Not as tantrum but allowing my bones to invite in healthy curiosity and uncomfortable challenges, but to sense the difference when it feels like judgement.

How can any of us be truly, fully understood?

Do we even want to be?

We say that one of the mainstays of humanity is our desire to belong and to be understood. We want to be seen, heard, and felt. We appreciate the longing for recognition and validation. It is indeed an exquisite thing to be understood, but what do we lose in the pursuit of it?

When I write or speak, I want my words to be clear enough to be understood. I don’t want my emails to be misinterpreted. I’m eager for the person at the other end of the line to understand my half of the conversation. I get it. I feel it. It’s important.

That’s communication.

Outside of that, I don’t need my humanness to be understood. I don’t carry a craving in my chest to be understood, anymore. I don’t want to be someone that can be solved, or figured out. I don’t want to be seen through how someone sees themselves. I don’t want to be perceived through someone’s perception of themselves. I want to be seen as me in my entirety, even if it will never be fully understood. I want to grow.

We muse on how far a soul can span beyond the perimeter of skin. We say that we’re stardust. Infinite. Limitless. Ever-expansive beings. The universe will never be able to be rationalised or understood. Why do we expect to be?

So, I give myself the space to be all the things and none of them at all. I allow myself to live sporadically, chaotically, and seasonally. I let myself live fully, and deliciously in the truth I create. I give myself the grace of changing my mind. Eating the same spinach and falafel wrap to the point of wanting to sing ballads about it, to now not being able to stomach it. I changed my mind.

All we can ever do is understand ourselves. We can be fascinated by someone and seek to understand parts of them, but we will never know all of them, and there’s a beauty in that. A precious quality that exists in not being able to knit together all of the interests, loves, sentences, and values that make someone up. Only they can do that for themselves.

There is something deeply emancipatory about existing as you are. Expressing yourself as you are. Choosing as you are. Speaking as you are. Experiencing as you are. Loving as you are. Without hoping to be understood. Without fear of people not getting it.

Just living fully, as you are.