When you have problems, who do you go to? Do you have problems you feel like you can’t share with anyone? I do.
Sometimes I feel alone, despite a multitude of people telling me they’re willing to listen to my problems. To be honest, it’s not that I don’t like them, or don’t believe them. I just don’t feel like I can open up to them.
Having people you can confide in is a luxury. When you confide in someone, they know your secrets. I voice what affects me in the here and now from time to time to some friends, but I’ve never had a single person whom I regularly confide in. I hear from people around me that I come off pretty relaxed and self-assured, but I don’t think of myself that way. I have my faults as well. I’m just as human as everyone and anyone else. I have my insecurities, my anxieties - just as how I have my confidence and my optimism.
It’s easy to see the conflicting traits in myself. It’s hard to see other people the same way. Everyone is complex, just like me and you.
Everyone has something that drives them; everyone has something they worry about.
Everyone has someone they’re especially kind to; everyone has someone they’re especially nasty to (or at least, someone they couldn’t care less about).
We often go through life forging, maintaining, evolving relationships with so many people. It’s hard to keep track of them all without reducing them to a set of likes/dislikes, or good/bad, nice/mean.
I’ve met many a person who can be mean, unforgiving, harsh, rude. That same person can be caring, kind, charitable. What you see from someone is just one side of the multifaceted polyhedron that is their personality.
That’s really beautiful, in my opinion.
People have aspirations, they have dreams, they have trauma, they’ve cried, loved, and lost.
That shapes who they are - that creates the person you’re seeing now. The same person can take different forms. What you and I see right now is the shape they take at this point in time. They can be strict, harsh, and unforgiving as of August 6, 2026. Come back later in 2 years - they’re kind, tender, and warm. Maybe they had a change in behaviour because they realised something, or because they lost someone. Something must have happened.
I used to be optimistic and bubbly as a child. My primary school teachers described me as “delightful”. I was friendly, sociable, and I loved to laugh.
I used to be cynical, self-deprecating, and snarky as a teenager. It was a difficult time in my life. I struggled a lot…with everything. It became difficult to find happiness at that point in my life.
Now, I’m a bit of both. Going through that rough teenage period helped me appreciate the beauty in things. I unearthed the buried friendliness I carried as a child. I realised how nice it is to make friends with new people, how revitalising it can be to talk to them, how happy and comfortable you can feel.
I like to believe that experiences shape someone just as much as their innate nature. Your experiences affect how you act, how you think, how you believe.
Believing this makes it hard to really connect with people though. It feels like I’ll never truly know someone. It makes it easier to understand them, sure. It makes it easier to befriend them. But I can’t trust them easily. It’s hard to open up.
Opening up is so deeply personal. But that’s why knowing someone is so deeply beautiful. And why getting to know someone is so important to me.
Until then!