mylifeinrambles.blog

A running list of things people have said about me that I do not understand:

You’re special. Your aura is blue. No wait, indigo. I prayed for you. God sent you to me. You’re unique. You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever met. You have the soul of an angel. You are an angel. You’re one of the smartest people I know.

And so on. The compliments are lovely. They are also, to me, written in a language I do not speak.

Because here’s my problem. People say these things — they tell me who I am, or who I am to them — and then they just… leave it there. No footnotes. No definitions. No little glossary in the back. They hand me this enormous statement like you have the soul of an angel and then sip their coffee, apparently satisfied, while I sit there going, “…okay, but what does that mean? What do you SEE? Because I would also like to see it.”

I think I’m supposed to already know. I think this is supposed to land somewhere in me and click into place. Sir, it does not click. There is no click. I have no context for the word “angel” as it applies to a 40-something woman standing in her kitchen who, may I remind everyone, has not put the laundry away.

So I do what I always do. I say thank you.

And I mean it, every time. Partly because I’m genuinely thankful — it is an extraordinary thing to be held in high regard by another human being. And partly because I am completely overwhelmed and have absolutely no idea what else to say.

Honestly, I think they’re the special ones. Think about it. To look at another person and actually see something rare in them, to feel it and name it out loud — that’s the gift. The aura readers and the angel-spotters are walking around with the ability to perceive something beautiful in other people and then be brave enough to mention it. That’s not nothing. That might be EVERYTHING.

But I don’t feel like any of it.

This is the part I keep turning over. I don’t feel special. I feel small. I feel normal. I feel like there are people walking this earth who are dramatically more important/special than I am, and I feel completely fine about that. I’m no one of note. I’ll never be more than just me — and the plot twist is I don’t want to be. That’s not false modesty. That’s just the honest weather report from inside my own head.

People tell me I’m extremely humble, and I appreciate it, but that one doesn’t fit either. Humble implies I’m holding something back, graciously declining to take a bow. I’m not declining the bow. I just genuinely don’t think I did the thing that earns one. You can’t be humble about a greatness you can’t even locate.

So none of their words feel true. Which left me with a question I actually wanted an answer to: fine, then — what DO I feel like?

And I sat with that one for a while. And here’s what I came up with.

I feel like a mosaic.

Not a single, gleaming, important thing. A mosaic. Lots of little pieces, all different materials, all different colors, all pressed together into something that only makes a picture when you step back far enough. Some pieces I picked up along the way. Some I found. Some I made myself, on purpose, out of necessity. And some were just there at the very beginning — the original few tiles that everything else got built around.

And in between all those pieces? Gold.

Like kintsugi — that Japanese art where you mend broken pottery with gold instead of hiding the cracks, so the place where the thing shattered becomes the most beautiful part of it. The gold in my mosaic is just the glue. It’s the stuff holding all the mismatched pieces together. But it’s beautiful too, and it runs through every gap and every seam, including the ones that came from things breaking.

The mosaic keeps getting bigger every single year. More intricate. More complicated. More interesting. Every year I add pieces, and the picture gets harder to take in at a glance and, I think, better for it. I am not one shining important thing. I am a thousand small things in gold-filled company, and somehow that adds up to a face.

That, I understand. That language I speak fluently. That feels true in a way “you’re an angel” never will.

And here’s the thing I actually believe.

I don’t think I’m unique in this. I think everyone is a mosaic of sorts. I think if you looked inside any person — the loud ones, the quiet ones, the ones convinced they’re nothing special — you’d find the same thing. A whole picture made of pieces. Original tiles and salvaged ones and the gold running bright through every crack where life got in.

Maybe that’s what people are actually seeing when they tell me I’m special. Not a halo. Just my particular arrangement of pieces, catching the light at the right angle.

So I’ll stop trying to decode the compliments and just keep adding tiles.

But I’m curious about yours, because I think yours is just as worth looking at as anyone’s.

What do you feel like your mosaic looks like?

(The picture with this post is my mosaic the AI made for what the inside of me looks like – I have no clue why it chose a phoenix, but figured I’d go with it.)