Frequency unheard

Have you ever felt like you’re screaming in a crowded room and no one turns their head? Not because they can’t hear you, but because somehow your voice is tuned to a frequency that others are immune or deaf to? That’s what it feels like to feel too much and not at all, simultaneously. And if you’re wondering how both can be true at once, welcome to my paradox.

Let me try explaining it (and I say try because even I don’t fully understand what I’m attempting to articulate. This has been weighing on me and I have postponed enough to not to write it and it is keeping me sleepless, so yeah!).

Feeling “too much” Looks Like This ?

Caring deeply about things that others just scroll past. Feeling emotions in technicolor while everyone else seems to view in grayscale. Speaking with intensity about ideas that make people shift uncomfortably in their seats. And being enthusiastic for a book, a thought, a midnight realization that is made to feel disproportionate to what the situation “deserves”. And being told, way too many times, through a glance, change of subject, or the oldest one in the book “that’s… interesting” instead of a smack on the face “shut up or you bore me”.

Many a times I have contemplated it as a “me” problem. If I really am passionate about something, I do not require an audience I will keep going with or without one right? And then the realization dawned upon me that I ain’t simply talking about an emotion, an incident or an isolated event that impacts only me or interests only me. It is about the pattern, structure, and the construct that runs you, me, and the entire extension of life around us. So, yes. I need an people. I need engagement. I need conversations to start somewhere.

What I do not need is, blind acceptance, unchallenged narrative, and disproportional hate without dialogue. And somehow in today’s world it is too much to expect. And to me, it feels too much to bear at times.

And Here’s Where It Gets Strange

Despite knowing that the feeling or ideology I feel for is real, important, and valid there are times I just don’t have it in me sometimes to talk it through. Primarily owing to being called as “left” by the right, “liberal” by the left, and “crazy lady” by the apolitical.

Honestly, I don’t care about the labels until what I speak is heard and I am engaged in a meaningful discourse that has inclusive voices for the better. But often than not, I wonder if I am smart enough to fully articulate what’s burning in my chest in the correct manner that makes people want to think about or even listen to? I am eloquent enough to make people see what I see? am I not consistent enough to be taken seriously? or substantial enough to matter? Because more often than not, I pour myself out and it evaporates even before it reaches my own paper from my pen.

Too Much Noise, Too Much Emotions, And Too Much Distractions

I perform “normal” until it exhausts me, then I retreat entirely. I share nothing for weeks, then I dump everything in a 2 AM text then regret by morning. Being either a flood or drought. Nothing in between. For a long time, I mistook intensity for magnitude. I assumed that if something felt enormous to me, it would naturally command the attention of others. But the world doesn’t always work that way. Today information arrives faster than reflection. To an extent that, it has saturated the level of empathy people have towards a sensitive news. Every hour brings a new headline, a new outrage, a new tragedy demanding our attention. And everything has become the “yet another” news rather than life of another person, a family, or a community of people.

In all that noise, even things that matter can begin to sound like just another notification. And maybe that’s what unsettles me most. Not that people disagree. But that we often move on before we’ve truly listened.

What’s The Point?

I realized that I could write a thousand words and still not capture the precise shade of melancholy that hit me while watching cloudy night sky laying over the terrace tank. I could talk for hours and still not make someone feel the weight of the epiphany which changed how I see an entire experience. And that doesn’t make it less real, less mine, or less worth feeling.

Being too much doesn’t mean you’re more than others, it just simply means you’re expressing at a different intensity than others. And feeling like you’re not enough doesn’t mean you’re less, but just that words to translate what’s within you hasn’t yet fully developed or understood.

And maybe that gap is the point? Maybe the fact that I feel this tension means I am attempting something that matters? Translation of the untranslatable. Expression of the inexpressible. The arrogance to believe that what’s inside us deserves to exist outside us, even if it is imperfect maybe is the point.

I don’t have a solution, but I do have idea that could support in meantime. Which is to write the messy thoughts. Speak even when voice shakes. Exist at natural frequency even if it means sometimes broadcasting to silence. Will it work? I don’t know. Ask me in a few years. Or maybe don’t, because I’ll probably still be figuring it out. But if you’ve ever felt like you’re too much and not at all, if you’ve ever stood in a room full of people and felt completely invisible while simultaneously feeling like you’re taking up too much space remember you’re not alone in that frequency.