On Expression

Expression is hard. Regardless of whether you're trying to do it through words, art, or action -- it's hard. Even those of us who make a living out of expression struggle with its elusive nature. But it's the entirety of what we need. More than anything, we need to be understood.

It's why we make friends. It's why we fight. It's why we fall in love. It's why we break each others' hearts. It's why we pursue our dreams, find a career, buy a car, or post our lives on the internet. We bare our souls, and, to varying degrees, we demand an audience. No matter what results from our pursuit of it, though, at its root, it's a simple need.

Whether it's through paint and pencils or tears and tantrums, whether it touches on the profound or dwells in mundanity, the little pieces of ourselves that we put out there just want to be heard, to feel some sense of reciprocation. Because we feel so strongly. And more often than not, we have no idea how to capture that sensation and reproduce it; how to bottle it up to put it on display for everyone -- or just a select few -- to see. To say "Look! This is what I mean! This is why I am!"

But we try. Not always knowingly, and not always with the best of intentions, but we all try. We hold a sliver of our hearts up to the light, to examine and wonder. Does it look the way we thought it would? Do you see me the way I see me? These experiments can end in disappointment, but rarely in defeat.

We keep trying. Against reason, against doubt, we try.

We hope. Boldly and fearfully, we hope that those fragments resembling our truest selves that we send out into the universe will one day reach a destination. That someone will receive it, absorb it, and see what we've been trying so hard to say all along -- that we are here, that we feel, and that we want to be felt in return. We want to know that we are not alone in this. Because no matter how personal expression may be, it is, in the end, an act of communion.

Those pieces of ourselves, floating and lost between us, don't always find a home. But we continue. Against the fear of wasting away, we continue, because we know when those pieces are found, by us or by others, we are made fuller. And so.

We speak. Or, in our silence, we yell. We write. We sing, dance, cry, laugh, scream, and shudder. We create. And in creating, in trying to convey who we are, we become. And it's in the trying that we refuse to give up.