THE LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND

Your Humanness

Understanding ourselves as living, feeling people rather than problems that need to be fixed.

You are a human.

You are a human in every sense of the word and you are capable of feeling the things that a human can feel and doing the things that humans do. You can move your arm in any direction that it moves, but you can’t move it in ways that it doesn’t.

I think this is an important place to start.

We often forget that we are humans made of flesh and bones. We are organisms within our environment and we are limited to doing things the way that humans do things. When we walk, we do it how humans do.

I am a human and as a human I can feel all the things that a human feels. I will feel anger, fear, sadness, jealousy, excitement, grief, loneliness, love and everything else that humans feel, but I will never feel what my dog feels. I won’t know the struggles of being an ant or an apple tree. I am limited to only knowing this world as a human.

I have a limited number of senses that work together to interpret the world around me and inside of me. My understanding of life is filtered through this human experience and because of that, I can never see everything perfectly clearly.

I can misunderstand people. I can misread situations. I can look back at my life and judge myself unfairly because I no longer remember what it felt like to stand in those exact circumstances.

I have biological functions that I’m aware of and can manipulate, and others that I have no control over whatsoever. I can regulate my breathing when needed but I can’t tell my kidney to stop functioning at will. I can control what I eat and when I eat but not the fact that I have to eat to sustain myself. I can’t hibernate when winter is near, I can only withstand it. I need to sleep at some point, whether I want to or not.

Hunger changes my mood.

Stress changes my focus.

Exhaustion changes the way that I see the world.

Sometimes we judge ourselves morally for things that are also biological. We expect ourselves to think clearly while overwhelmed, love perfectly while wounded, and function normally while depleted.

But humans do not operate that way.

As humans, we grow and change from inside the womb to inside the coffin. There is a path to being a human and it involves growing.

This is super important because you are not constructed. You are not a building put together with hammers and nails. You aren’t a computer to be reprogrammed or a motherboard that needs to be rewired. If there is a problem, AAA can’t replace your tire or give you a jump. You are a person and you operate differently than most things we are used to.

Human beings are living systems. We change, adapt, protect, rest, reconnect, and grow. We do not always move in a straight line. Sometimes we feel strong and open. Other times, we pull back to survive. Some wounds heal quietly, and some leave scars; but, even with scars, growth is still possible.

Of course I’m a person and I don’t expect anyone coming out and changing my tire. But we do expect that we get over a disappointment in our careers without too much disruption or heal from a broken heart in an appropriate timeline. We expect to rebuild our relationships and assemble our perfect self with the same approach that we take to broken machines and processes.

If I could only replace this behavior and substitute this feeling for another then I would really be the best. If I could remove my worry, stop overthinking, become more motivated, or erase my grief then maybe I would finally become the person I’m supposed to be.

But we do not work that way and that is okay.

Growth in humans is organic. It happens through interaction with life itself. We learn through experience, relationships, pain, reflection, curiosity, failure, success and time. Sometimes growth looks obvious and sometimes it looks like surviving. Sometimes the strongest thing a person can do is continue.

A tree does not scream at itself while it grows crooked around a rock. It adapts to the environment that it is in and continues reaching toward the light.

Humans are not so different.

Everything you feel is within the bounds of being a human, whether it is comfortable or not. It is necessary and part of being a person is that you have to feel things.

This does not mean that you are right or that you should act out of it, but it means that everything you feel is allowable. Anger, fear, shame, grief, worry and sadness are not proof that you are defective. They are human experiences arising within a human life.

Our feelings have value and purpose. The things we feel are significant and there is no waste within us. Even the emotions we dislike are often trying to protect something important.

Worry prepares us for danger.

Grief reflects connection.

Loneliness pushes us toward people.

Anger reacts to boundaries and unfairness.

Emotions are not random glitches in the system. They are part of being alive. This does not mean that every feeling should control us.

Feelings can be incomplete, distorted, reactive or based on misunderstandings. But rejecting our emotions entirely creates another problem.

Humans cannot selectively numb themselves. When we shut down pain, we often shut down joy, connection, creativity and love along with it.

We can’t flatten all the mountains and expect the rivers to still know where to flow.

Once we realize this, everything starts to look different.

We stop viewing ourselves as failed machines and start understanding ourselves as living beings trying to adapt to life. We stop expecting perfection from ourselves while under impossible circumstances. We stop treating every wound like proof that we are broken beyond repair.

Acceptance doesn’t mean I stop growing.

It means I stop treating myself like a mistake while I grow.