Numbers to my soul
I had a thought today that was a bit funny in my head, and just like most thoughts, this one ended up being a rabbit hole to delve into. It kept ringing in my head for a while till I sat down and started trying to make sense of it.
The thought in its simplest form: “Well shit, my friends are really really different.”
I got this thought when I was thinking about my week, and the different interactions I had with my friends. People who are so completely different from each other, when it comes to political opinions, religious beliefs, thoughts on life, and their perception of the world. I started feeling like I could categorize my friends, based on the types of conversations I’d have with them, based on the advice I’d ask, and based on the person I am around them.
It freaked me out because one path on this rabbit hole made me think “Wait so who am I?”, and I started thinking of that old joke where they tell you to be yourself when meeting strangers and you wonder “Which self exactly?”. I started feeling like if I was to describe my personality, one way of doing it would be to simply introduce you to my closest friends to me and highlight the things we share. The culmination of those things would probably be a faded picture of who I am.
I started to try to make sense of this thought, and I tried to put a metaphor to it because isn’t that what you try to do when language fails you when you’re trying to explain something?
Went through a bunch of metaphors in my head, and being the son of a math teacher, I loved the idea that I share percentages of me with people. It sounded exciting in my head, to think that my soul is shared in percentages in different ways with different people.
So here’s what I did, I grabbed a piece of paper, and I decided to think out loud and define a little bit the person I am around my different friends without overanalyzing it and getting into heavy details. Here’s what I ended up with:
Without overthinking it, it was an “ok” dissection of the different parts of who I am around people. Sure, I could have added a bunch more like “The guy that finds guilty pleasure in reading young adult books” but that’s for another day.
Now it was the exciting part, taking this and seeing which percentages I share with my circle of people.
I immediately started understanding how certain friends see a higher percentage of me in certain areas while less in other areas, and I started seeing how certain conversations I’ve had were shaped by the percentage I am showing of myself with that person.
For a second I doubted if I was being a hypocrite, shouldn’t “being myself” be me sharing all these different parts comfortably with strangers?
Then it hit me, I realized that the people that I love the most see the most from me. But that didn’t happen overnight, it happened in the same way you peel an onion. One layer at a time, one comfortable vulnerability to the next, increasing the percentage day by day.
I realized that if anything, the diversity of my friends only helped me be a better person by putting all these different parts to test, by giving each part of me a chance to learn about itself and appreciate it. Some of my friends even added new parts to that pie, shaped them, made sense of them for me and helped me navigate my own self awareness.
This all reminded me of a Shakespeare quote that I never fully understood till today if I’m being honest, where he explained his gratitude for friendships by saying the following “I count myself in nothing else so happy As in a soul remembering my good friends.”
See people that have a higher percentage of seeing all these different parts of me, are the people that I cherish and enjoy being around the most. And is that what love is? A mere numerical percentage of how much of your soul you’re willing to share with the other person?
It’s a bitter-sweet thought to think that love is just simply someone having a higher percentage of access to your soul. But hey, that thought is an entirely different rabbit hole to explore..
