a stream of consciousness on love
are we strangers or close friends?
This essay turned out a little different than usual, but it tumbled out of me so naturally that I had to share it. I hope you enjoy this casual stream of consciousness on love, writing, and luck.
There is a certain intimacy to writing, to reading. You experience the words exactly the way the author wants you to. There is nothing ornamenting them. I think that’s why I like writing so much: there’s something pure about it. It’s just you and me. Me writing, you reading. An unadulterated form of human connection that feels hard to cultivate these days. I do my best to strip everything away when I write. I do my best to reveal myself to you honestly, without the typical distractions we ornament ourselves with.
All art is a form of self-expression—I really believe that. But writing feels impossibly intimate, like we’re two humans passing by each other on the street that stumble into a deep, honest, unflashy conversation about life, connecting over the way we see it (which tends to be much more similar than it is different). That's why I love writing, or that’s part of why I love it: it feels natural, it feels human. It’s the meeting of minds. You're only still here, your eyes jumping from one word to the next, if you are sincerely interested in what I have to say, which seems significant and worth reflecting on. Especially because at this point I'm not saying much at all except that, well, I feel really lucky to be here. Extraordinarily lucky to have the ability to put my thoughts into words, even luckier that I can send them out to the world, luckier still that you find enough meaning in them to spend a precious moment of your life reading them. I just feel very lucky. That’s something I’ve noticed about being more honest with myself, stripping away the things I used to ornament my existence with: a fancy job, a good degree, nice clothes, how glossy my hair looked. I’ve stopped identifying with most of these things and started identifying more with (and feeling grateful for) what was underneath all of that: me.
I take comfort in the fact that you can't see any of that, anyway. All you can really see are these words. You don't know that much about me, and yet you're still here. I find that fascinating. It means (at least I think it means) that you are here for who I really am: for my mind, for how I think, for what I read, for how I synthesize all of that and put it into words to make sense of this weird, confusing, but beautiful existence. I think that is quite lovely—that we don't know much about each other but can still connect over the synchronicity of our individual experiences. There's something beautiful about how writing connects us, not just you and me, but all of us: it's the most timeless form of human art.
I saw a tweet the other day that said something like, “businesses from 2,000 years ago no longer exist, but books from that time period do” and I thought—wow, there's something to think about. We can read something written 2,000 years ago and connect with it, see ourselves in it. There's something—not to overuse the word, but—human there. Writing connects us because words are the essence of existence. Language is how we talk to ourselves, communicate with others. It’s literally how we connect! Words let us share in our lives, share in the lives of those around us, and get to know those from the past that we can only access through the words they left behind.
There is something about this medium that makes me feel like I am doing something good, something true. True is a tough word—hard to define, hard to use precisely given how cheapened it has become by its excessive usage. One thing I’ve had to face after spending more time with words is that they are limiting. They can get you pretty close, but they cannot describe things exactly the way you see them, feel them, experience them. But I digress: the word true feels right here, or at least the closest thing to right that I can find. And hey, maybe I’m wrong about why I write—maybe I'm writing to chase virtue or because I’m self-absorbed. I’m sure some of you must think that. I might too if I wasn’t in my own mind, watching myself write. Because when I’m doing it, that’s not how it feels at all. It feels the opposite of indulgent: writing is the most humbling thing that I do. It puts my humanity on display to myself in a way that I don’t confront otherwise. It shows me how excruciatingly hard it is to describe things precisely, how far I still am from doing that well. It shows me that I feel many things, some of them shocking to even me. It shows me that I’m less enlightened and much less mature than I think I am. It repeatedly shows me that I’m human, which is perhaps another reason that I love it so much. To me, writing is connecting with you, with others that know nothing (really) about me, but can see my humanity in these words and hopefully see themselves in them, too. And that feels like an extraordinary thing: to connect like close friends over a stranger’s stream of consciousness.
It strikes me that you’re still here, reading. Even more remarkable to me is that you are here without me having to ornament my existence to hold your attention. That makes it much more wonderful, surprising, informative even? It is a good reminder that at the end of the day, what we crave is humanity, is connection, is this. It’s feeling seen. It’s you seeing me. It’s me seeing you. It’s our minds connecting, however asynchronously and distantly through the best medium we have to describe the ineffability of existence: words. They are certainly not enough—they do no justice to how unique and winding the human experience is—but hey, they’re something. They're the best that I can do.
Maybe this is just a long way of saying that my love language is understanding. I want to hear what you have to say, and I want you to hear what I have to say. This explains my confusion at other people’s relationships, at people claiming that they prioritize looks over everything, that they “don’t really care what their partner has to say.” I cannot comprehend this flavour of love—I can only think: wait, you don’t want your relationship to be one long conversation that you never want to end? I’ve never understood it, and I still struggle to. I don’t get how anyone could love or feel loved by someone who they haven’t formed a deep, guttural mental connection with. But I now realize why I never could understand this: it is the antithesis of my definition of love.
Love, to me, is attention aimed at a person’s mind. I talk around this in crushes are often just misplaced ambition, but I think this is a more precise way to define my love language: mental connection. Attention through listening to someone, attention through asking questions, attention through reading what they write, attention through writing back to them—enough attention to develop a deep mental connection with someone. Joan Didion said of her relationship with her husband:
“We imagined we knew everything the other thought.”
There’s something about the seamlessness of this that strokes at the deepest definition of love I can think of: to know each other’s minds so well you can predict their thinking.
But this is just me, my version of love. Different people strive for different kinds of love, different kinds of attention. My best guess is that we want to feel seen for the things we form our identity around. This also explains how I’ve dissociated with what was ‘ornamental’ to my true self: prestige, status, my appearance even. I never really craved feeling seen, feeling loved for those things. What I want is to feel seen for what I truly identify with—my mind, my thoughts, my words. I think I’ve always (subconsciously) wanted to captivate people with my mind, not my looks, not my “accomplishments.” I felt like: anyone can have those. Looks are mostly luck, and accomplishments are achievable through a formula that if you pay even a shred of attention to, you can easily solve for. But words? Speech? Describing your experience in a way that people can resonate with? Now, there’s an aim that feels worthwhile to me. That takes effort, practice, attention.
I guess what I’m saying is: as I’ve shed the trivial layers of my identity, I’ve realized what makes up the substance of it—my ability to describe my life, my experience. Or, said differently: my ability to express and receive my flavour of love. That must be why I feel so fulfilled these days. I’ve found the thing that is truly me: writing. Writing feels like plugging myself into this reciprocal socket, where I get to share my version of love with you—and you (perhaps unknowingly) reciprocate that love by reading. And I’m doing this every day. I’m living the dream, it feels like: expressing love and receiving love every day, doing what I love!
I’m sitting here in disbelief that I just wrote that sentence and it feels true. I didn’t know what I was going to sit down and write about today, but this came rushing out of me like water flowing down a mountain—pulled by a force out of its control, like my identity unravelling to reveal what is at its core. My essence is just lying here under this pile of text now, raw and exposed. But I don’t mind being exposed—it is the prerequisite to being loved after all, and that seems to be the point of this whole thing.
This all makes me feel so fortunate, ineffably so. After all of these words, I still feel like I cannot describe how sincerely lucky I feel—to have found what I love doing and to be doing it. I mean, it feels like I’ve won the existence lottery or something. Now, I just need to find a way to keep doing it indefinitely to maintain a life busting with love. Anyway, I’ll stop streaming my thoughts at you now. I feel like you’ve shown me enough love for today. So, thanks. Love you.
Do you resonate with what I write about? Maybe we should work together: If you resonate with the ideas I write about and want to cultivate a life you genuinely enjoy living, where you align your actions with your values, move towards the changes you know you want to make, and consciously harvest self-knowledge in the process, send an email to isabel@mindmine.school or to isabel@mindmine.school or DM me on Twitter to explore what working together 1-1 would look like.
PS—If you enjoyed this, you might like my Twitter where I share short-form ideas like the ones in this essay. You might also want to read a piece I wrote about intensity.
This was beautiful, Isabel. Thank you for sharing your definition of love. I often think about attention and how it's paid, as well. The way we can shift our focus, and if we really exercise our abilities, we can put it on what we find most important. Love is where we place our attention. You seem to have yours set well.
Simply beautiful! My day has been enriched. Thank you!