tangents

I’ve never been especially good with people—not in the lived sense. But I’ve always been good at observing them. Noticing the way they move through life, the way they carry their histories. We’re all told we’re unique, and in a way, we are—our memories, our fears, the shape of our grief. But if you stand far enough, the differences begin to blur. Patterns emerge. Most people move along trajectories set early in life—childhood, adolescence—like tangents drawn from a point long ago. They rarely deviate.

Every path is its own, but the shape of the journey? That part is strangely shared.

The rare few who notice this—who question the path they’re on—are often called self-aware. It’s a beautiful word. A difficult one. Because true self-awareness doesn’t come gently. It’s earned—through loss, through solitude, through the painful work of reflection. I’d like to think I have some of it. But I’ve also mistaken many local minimums for global ones. Believed I’d arrived, when really I’d only settled.

That, if nothing else, tells me I still have a long way to go.

There were stretches of time where I was convinced I had arrived.

A new city. A steady income. Late-night calls that turned into habits. The kind of routine that makes you believe in progress. I thought I was growing. I thought I was healing. But really, I was just learning how to decorate a cage.

That’s the thing about local minimums: they’re comfortable. They reward you just enough to keep you still. You tell yourself this must be it—this must be happiness, or adulthood, or love. You write essays in your head about how far you’ve come. You silence the part of you that wonders why you still feel hollow the moment the noise fades.

The trap I fell into was that I let myself believe that being seen was the same as being known. But over time, I began to realize I had given the best parts of myself to the performance of selfhood, not the substance of it. I played the role so well I started to forget it was a role at all.

It’s humbling to realize you’ve been circling a version of yourself you no longer recognize. That even self-awareness, if untested, can calcify into delusion. That’s when I understood: growth isn’t loud. It doesn’t announce itself. It slips in through the cracks, usually after something breaks.