Feeling Broken

wanting to feel human again

The last time I was on Substack was a month ago, which has been quite a while! I had ideas of what to write on Substack for the past for the past few weeks, but did not feel like writing them because I have 8 AM meetings for my internship, which means sleeping early to get up early.

I have been thinking a lot about emotions like romance and love this past month, not because I have a crush on someone, but rather because I somehow want to experience those feelings again. My thoughts about these feelings motivated me to make a short playlist last week called “Sad,” with the description as the following: help me I feel broken. I already have a playlist called “Sad Classical” and another playlist of sad Mandopop songs, so this playlist consisted of four Laufey songs about love.

Out of the four songs I chose, “Fragile” stands out the most because I heard someone sing that song live at an MIT event in May and it hit me. Everything about the song is beautiful — the lyrics, the voice, the instrumentation, just everything. “Fragile” is the kind of song I like listening to even though it makes me sad. I wouldn’t say the song is inherently sad based on the lyrics. Some of the lyrics are about being fragile, but the chorus is so romantic and magical:

The soft candle glow

The music so slow

Your skin on my skin

The room is spinning

Nerve in my bone

I'm shaking oh no

I'm talking though I shouldn't be

I've lost all sensibility

I've never been so fragile

What made me sad as I listened to the live performance was realizing how I didn’t want to be fragile. Although I am willing to be vulnerable in my The Tech column articles, I believe that vulnerability is different from what I want. Revealing my insecurities and feelings on The Tech is to understand myself better, to make sense of my tangled thoughts. On the other hand, the vulnerability I seek is interpersonal, something that involves touch or physical closeness. The problem is that I don’t know how to be intimate. I guess I have shared some personal things with my friends and other peers, but it’s not the same fragility illustrated in the lyrics.

My mind is conflicted about this. I want to experience what Laufey is describing in “Fragile,” but also don’t want to because it requires being fragile. Keeping my thoughts and emotions to myself feels comfortable because I don’t have to think about judgment or dynamics, but would cause problems in the future. I do not feel the need to be in a relationship currently because I am not in the mood. Despite my lack of interest, I wonder how long I can go on like this.

The reasons that “Fragile” made me feel wistful crystallized when my friends and I went over to my friend’s house and did karaoke after dinner. “Fragile” was one of the songs, and the rest were pop songs by artists like Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, etc. Lots of the songs were about love: falling in love, breaking up, etc. As I read the lyrics of some unfamiliar songs on the TV screen, I had this weird epiphany about why I had random thoughts of being in a relationship — I wanted to feel human again. I wanted to experience the human condition at its fullest, even if that meant experiencing the lows.

In hindsight, being very sad for a week in January was indeed sad, but also built me up again from shards of broken glass, kind of like the Japanese word kintsugi, an art that uses broken pieces of pottery joined by gold lacquer. Maybe I am glamorizing the experience to make it sound more beautiful than it was, but I truly believe that the process of sorting out and clarifying my emotions was a great way to begin the new year.

I know how stupid the reason sounds, as if I can’t feel human if I am aromantic. I still identify as heteroromantic, but recently considered the possibility of being on the aromantic spectrum. It will take me a while to figure that out, which is honestly fine. But getting back to the main point about feeling human.

The answer “feeling human” is awfully vague and generic, but suffices for my standards. I would like to go on, but unfortunately I don’t want to reveal too much of myself so I will end this blog here. Sorry to disappoint you readers.