The Paradox of Being Human

We are walking contradictions.

Sacred, spiralling, often unresolvable.

And still — still we try to make ourselves make sense.

We want freedom,

and we want safety.

We want to be fully seen,

but we’re terrified of being exposed.

We want to rest,

and we want to prove ourselves.

We want to love without condition,

but we draw boundaries to survive.

We want truth,

and we want comfort.

We want to believe in something bigger,

but we also want control.

We are taught that to be clear is to be pure.

That certainty is power.

That contradiction means we’re unstable, hypocritical, or weak.

That changing our minds is betrayal.

That confusion must be fixed.

That ambivalence is failure.

But none of this is true.

The older I get, the more I realize that what it actually means to be human — what it means to live — is to hold paradox.

To feel joy while grieving.

To long for something you already have.

To be healing and hurting.

To speak a truth that contradicts the truth you told yesterday — not because you’re lying, but because you’ve grown.

To stand inside the tension of opposites and not collapse.

And yet, so many of us run from this place.

We try to “figure it out.”

We pick a side, label it “right,” and exile the other.

We shame our confusion.

We spiritual-bypass our rage.

We try to shrink ourselves down to something singular, sharp, and easy to explain.

But we are not easy to explain.

We are vast. We are changing.

We are rivers and storms and still water.

We are animal and angel, logic and dream, flesh and frequency.

And in our refusal to be boxed in,

in our courageous willingness to stay inside the contradictions —

we remember what it is to be whole.

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I think sometimes about how much aliveness is lost in our pursuit of certainty.

How many marriages end not because of lack of love, but because we’re not taught that you can be deeply committed and occasionally unsure.

How many mothers feel shame for craving space, not knowing it’s natural to feel both fierce devotion and the desperate need to be alone.

How many dreams we abandon because they scare us, not realizing that fear is often the price of stepping into something sacred.

This is the paradox:

We are not one thing.

We are never just one thing.

And the more we try to be —

the more we fracture, the more we grieve without knowing why.

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What if we stopped making sense of ourselves?

What if the most courageous thing we could do

was to let the paradox live?

What if we honoured it?

I can love you and need space.

I can be grateful and still want more.

I can feel powerful and fragile.

I can know who I am and still be becoming.

This isn’t weakness.

It’s our design.

It’s the living proof that our hearts are awake.

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To be human is to hold it all.

To weep and laugh in the same breath.

To rage against the world and pray for its healing.

We are not contradictions to solve.

We are mysteries to witness.

And in that witnessing,

we remember the most beautiful truth of all:

That wholeness was never about being one thing.

It was always about being everything we are —

without apology,

without resolution,

without the need to make it neat.

Just true.

Messy, miraculous,

and wildly, impossibly

true.