The Absurdity of Being Human

Day 91 – February 22, 2026

Being human is deeply weird when you actually stop and think about it. And I don’t mean that in some cute, coffee mug, “we’re all a little messy” way. I mean structurally. We are these unbelievably intelligent little animals walking around with smartphones, trauma responses, childhood wounds, good lighting, terrible judgment, and the wild confidence to act like we know what we’re doing.

Most of us do not.

We are improvising with shoes on. That thought has been weirdly comforting to me lately. Because for a long time after the assaults, I felt like something had fundamentally broken the trajectory of my life. Like everyone else was out there moving forward in an orderly little line while I was off to the side trying to figure out how to survive inside a nervous system that had become deeply committed to worst case scenario fan fiction.

But the more I observe people, the more I realize something almost funny. Everyone is carrying something. Loss. Shame. Fear. Desire. Grief. Private confusion. Old humiliations dressed up as personality. Entire inner operas no one else can hear. Human beings are out here buying groceries and making small talk while secretly carrying whole cathedrals of contradiction inside them.

That is insane. And also kind of beautiful.

We want love and safety and freedom and to be understood and to be admired and to never be embarrassed again and maybe a snack and maybe a nap and maybe someone to text back immediately without us having to explain why that matters.

No one is simple. No one.

Some people hide it better. Some people repress it harder. Some people sublimate their entire inner world into productivity, yoga, or pretending to be “chill,” which is almost always a lie and sometimes a cry for help in expensive denim.

But underneath all of it?

Chaos. Tenderness. Confusion. Need. Performance. Longing. Ego. Hope. And the deeply suspicious choice to keep going anyway. That fascinates me.

Maybe because I am human in a particularly obvious way. I don’t know how to be flat. I don’t know how to move through the world without noticing things, feeling things, overthinking things, explaining things, quietly clocking the emotional architecture of a room while also wondering whether beauty, danger, and absurdity have always lived this close together or if I’m just unusually tuned to the frequency.

Probably both.

And trauma changed that too, of course. It made some things sharper. It made me more aware of what people carry and what they hide and how often those two things are related. It made me less naive about human nature. Less willing to assume that if someone appears normal, they must be safe. Less likely to confuse functionality with goodness.

But weirdly, it did not make me less interested. If anything, I’m more interested now.

Because once you stop needing people to be simple, they become much more fascinating. Once you let go of the fantasy that everyone is coherent and kind and emotionally well lit, you start seeing the real thing. And the real thing is so much stranger.

Roger spent the afternoon barking at squirrels like they had personally insulted his entire lineage. His existential philosophy appears to be: if it moves, question it aggressively. Honestly? Valid.

That may be the truest instinct of all.

To be suspicious. To be curious. To project meaning onto random motion. To decide something matters and then build a whole emotional infrastructure around it before lunch. We are absurd.

And I love that about us. Even now. Even after everything. Even after seeing what we are capable of at our worst, I still cannot help being fascinated by what we are at our strangest. Fragile and resilient. Ridiculous and profound. Terrible and tender. Smart enough to build empires and clueless enough to ruin our own lives over things we refuse to name honestly.

That’s incredible.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And the wonderfully absurd experience of being human still somehow interesting enough to keep me watching.