Invisible

Interacting with people in real life bears little resemblance to how you pictured it. The color in life is so intense from inside the four gray walls of your empty bedroom. When you go out, when you realize everyone is just like you, the world loses its luster. Always looking. Not Finding. Moving. Not understanding. We’re scared seeing our own feelings reflected in others.

A thought experiment: suppose we do everyone else a “favor” whenever we go out into the world and hide our true selves. You might say: it’s better that way, lest our friends frown when they see their own faults reflected in ours. God forbid our friends, seeking respite, see all the feelings they are afraid of in themselves, reflected in our eyes too. We are scary creatures. And we are scared too. Just like spiders.

How can we warm up to each other, how can it be genuine, if opening up requires so much effort?

This is probably why love is so elusive. By sheer laws of physics. Or by something deeper?

Maybe it’s because the rawness, the piercing stare of love will turn us into stone? The same feeling when cold water is run over a rug burn. The same prickling pain of a sunburn being caressed. Or perhaps: love tries to pull out an arrow fatally lodged in all our hearts?

Wanting to be seen, and loved, is selfish if we can’t bring ourselves to see others the same way.

If we don’t make a consistent effort. If we don’t put energy into love, forgiveness, and acceptance, every day, both of our own faults and of others. — We will never be able to receive all the love we deserve, without flinching with guilt at the love we don’t know how to give.

Originally published on my personal blog at https://yuvalmedina.com/blog/