I’ve reached many discoveries upon becoming an “adult.” For one, I’ve perfected what my 24-year-old self looks like on paper. I can list my life accomplishments, perform a spoken-word version of them with the ease of a narcissist’s heartbeat. I can sell myself to a crowd, leaving with my net worth intact and my dignity only slightly diminished. I’ve learned that empathy is a rare skill, one that generations neglected to teach their children when they tried to beat discipline into them instead. That most people work hard to change the disingenuity bred into their bones but succeed only in masking it with unassuming paint. And I’ve realized that most things in life are both meaningless and valuable at the same time, that I can migrate between the two as easily as I’d fly from coast to coast. That meaning and value depend entirely on the scale within which I choose to recognize my existence.
Once I started documenting myself on paper, I felt like I became more clinical, more sterile the way I assessed others. It was like their emotional state gained a certain transparency that I could build an internal monologue around – stream-of-consciousness style. I met someone who seemed like he picked certain people to join his world not because of who they were, but because he saw them as objects to embellish his life with. As if hanging ornaments from a tree to show whatever stranger cared to see – look what I’ve acquired. I met someone whose insecurities impede her ability to feel joy for any other woman’s success, despite her attempts to convince us otherwise. Constantly shifting and diminishing her accomplishments based on her resentment towards another’s. I met someone whose obsession with physical relationships stems from an internal yearning for intimacy, a loneliness that masculinity would rather stifle under the stench of half-used condoms than confess to. Worsening with each dull new sexual conquest polished shiny for temporary relief, taken like an Advil for period cramps. The negative aspects of personality have a way of making themselves known. Their stench is pungent – hangs in the air like a gargantuan cloud and adds thickness to the walls, easily identifiable for anyone paying enough attention.
Negative qualities carry weight the way they flood a room. But once the weight lifts, I can spot positives lingering in cracks and crevices with a humble subtlety. Small and inconsequential, they stack and stack until I can see their true value. Like when I’m standing in line at the bookstore holding The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto and a woman behind me tells me that the crow on the cover reminds her of a crow that used to live in the tree by her house back home. Reminds her of how she’d go outside with crumbled pieces of stale bread in a clay dish that she’d place at the foot of the tree, how she’d watch from her window as the crow ate each piece with an unseen fragility. Like when I delve into how the Shiite system of scholarship informs an Islamic school of thought that forever evolves with the acquisition of knowledge. And the man sitting next to me at the coffee shop nods his head, his face confused but his eyes shining as if reflecting my excitement. Like when the guy leaning against the subway pole with his skateboard wedged between his arm and torso, builds for me with his hands the topography of mountains he biked through on his trip to the Northern areas of Pakistan. Shows me with his arms how large the tent was in which he revived his spiritual and intellectual self, in which he reformed the biases and prejudiced preoccupations that he once had about a region so diverse. Or like when I’m sitting at a doctor’s office that I’ve never been to but it still feels familiar the way doctor’s offices normally do, and a nurse in blue scrubs asks me to pronounce my name for her and when I do, she smiles and says, “that sounds so pretty coming out of your mouth.”
Negative qualities are isolationist in their very nature – like throwing a drop of oil in a cup of water, easy and quick to identify the way they force themselves to be noticed. My negative qualities – selfishness, narcissism, ego – isolate me like white paint isolates a bold stroke. These qualities are individual in their obsession with the self, only able to view the vast cornucopia of events around them in relation to the self. But I find that the positives of character are most present in my need to connect and form relationships with those I meet, in my compulsion to listen and to communicate. What I’ve realized is that the goal and byproduct of genuine human connectivity is emotional unison – feelings from one reflected back at the other until they form an equilibrium. Like watercolor, two drops of paint dripping distinctly down a page until they touch, merge, flow into each other and produce something entirely new. Positive qualities are created by a constant influx of human interaction, blooming out of the self to be shared with others.
As I age, as I add to the arsenal of experiences that sculpt and shape my personality, I begin to acquire space. I stretch and expand until I find more of myself reflected in those I meet. While sitting in the park recently, I rooted myself into the rotating ground and watched people walk past, thinking about how they all were expanding every day just like I was. I thought about how when I sit still and watch people swarm around me, it’s so easy to feel like the world was made for me to observe. I thought about how many times in my interactions with these ever-growing people had I lost and rediscovered the same parts of myself over and over and over again.
Images - تصاویر 