life has never been this quiet before.
quiet, as in you can count the number of conversations i’m part of every day, and it wouldn’t even take up the fingers on your one hand, work slack channel included. quiet, as in i just finished watching my 50th movie for this year, already almost on the 1/4 mark of my goal to see 222 films for 2022, and february’s not even done yet. quiet, as in i’m getting bad at keeping my journal filled with entries because my days are so uneventful lately. i’m not miserable about it. i just don’t see the point of writing “nothing much happened today” again and again.
but beneath the surface-level quietness that mostly means i have a lot of time for binge-watching, lies the quiet lull inside. if i think about it, the noise may have started thinning out right around the time i lost my grandfather last november. or maybe it’s around my 23rd birthday, while i was high on mandatory birthday epiphanies. or maybe the ripple effect started way before that, on a seemingly random day i was outside to watch the sunset. or later, while i was recovering from being sick to the core that i missed the 12AM new year fireworks for the first time in my life. it felt like waking up one day and realizing i'm already leaning on the nothingness, fully dependent on it to make so much of the misplaced pieces in my head, arranged.
i think for so long i have been living with the anxiety that i wouldn’t be significant for anything - all the movies and this blog and this person i curate myself for the rest of the world’s viewing, none of it is not genuine. but who’s really looking? do my words even resonate with anybody else? did my desire to share who i am only cause me my own alienation? i feel like i took pieces of me to let go to the void, so it can be a part of the rest than just mine alone, and in reply i hear nothing but my own voice echoing.
i despise being caught up in this mental push and pull of wanting to create and express as nothing else but the act of being human - free and able, and the inevitable hole i fall in of constantly seeking external validation to feel like the things i do are actually remarkable. seems like every so often i get confused and forget how to be this living thing and my mind just goes into a haywire as it retraces my mishmashed thought patterns to find my way back to stability. i retreated into the silence and for a moment i felt untethered, not yearning for any recognition, no expectations from a world i feel is so hard to please. but then the other shoe drops, and i realized that i haven't been waiting for anything mostly because i haven't been busy being.
i reckon humans have always been vulnerable to feeling this way, even the great ones who do end up making something so extraordinary that it becomes suspended in time, admired by generations after them. i don’t really seek that kind of merit. all i know is that people flooded the streets during my grandfather’s wake - every single one of them clutching a story of how they will remember him. when i turned 23, i wondered how the people who sent their sweet happy birthdays!s would describe me to another person, if put in the situation. would i be crammed into a single word definition, or would i be long recollection of some embarrassing encounter from college? how many of them see me only through the lens of the words i've written? and if they met me, had a laugh with me, shared their time with me, did my company left them an imprint well worth keeping for a future possible retelling? or have i been living my life not really amounting to more than just a familiar face?
i don't dream of being famous. it's not a memorial to my name that i want. most days i genuinely don't really like people. but even then, the sappy truth about me is that i love this world, and feeling like i belong in it is the anchor that steadies me onto the ground. and as all humans live in an array of creating and improving and healing and loving and fumbling our way through every arduous, worthy, beautiful day, i hardly think it’s the worst thing to pine for the gratification of being seen.
seen for the good of me. seen for the passions that ignite my soul. seen for the beauty i possess past what the naked eyes can linger on. seen for my incessant attempt to always be more.