on feeling seen

all roads really do lead back to mirrors by justin timberlake

i don’t know if i want my list anymore.

which is strange, because for the longest time, i truly believed it was one of the more sensible things i’d done. tired after a string of let-downs and heartbreaks from situations i simply ended up in instead of consciously choosing, i decided to be intentional. pages and pages of qualities and values and habits and feelings and oddly specific experiences, all meticulously detailed and painstakingly assembled in an effort to answer a question i’d somehow gone twenty-five years without asking myself: what do i actually want?

i’m notoriously particular. my list was no different. it was exhaustive. detailed to the point of absurdity. by the end i had described not just a man but an entire life. the small things and the large ones. the daily rhythms and the once-in-a-lifetimes. i hadn’t written a checklist. i’d written a person. so fully realized, so thoroughly imagined, that the bar wasn’t a bar anymore. it was a blueprint. and as i wrote, i laughed at myself. with my track record, this hypothetical, fictional, unicorn of a man felt far-fetched and impossible. i closed the document. that was a nice few hours of humoring myself with wishful thinking. time to snap out of it and move on.

i was wrong.

much time passed. i forgot about the list. i met someone.

there are many things i could say about him. many things i have said about him. but for all the details i’d outlined and all the traits i jotted down, the list never came to mind when i met him. i didn’t cross-check, i didn’t go line by line ticking off qualities as they were revealed. i looked at him and felt something my list did not even consider.

it was a familiarity i had never felt before. something in the way he moved through the world matched the rhythms of the way i did. when he looked at me, i felt seen. being around him felt like setting down something heavy i didn’t know i was carrying. i fell because there was inexplicable simplicity to it all. an effortless oh. there you are.

home is where you can let down the masks, forget about the facades. i imagined a sound mind, capability, gorgeous eyes, and shared goals. i never imagined someone being able to unravel the tangles of my thoughts without my help. i never imagined “it looks a little bit different for me, but i feel that too. i want that too. i do that too.” it felt like coming home. each bit of the facade taken off, each knot untied, every new learning about the other was met with nothing but a yes. yes, show me more. we’ll uncover these depths together. something i never anticipated. i didn’t know how much it mattered to me to feel seen without bending and folding into different angles to match the other person’s line of sight. i’d gotten so used to it over the years. i’d become so flexible. but here, we stood upright, eye to eye. i had never experienced it before. so i never knew to look for it. so it never made the list.

long after the fall, i remembered it existed. i pulled it out to remind myself of what i once wanted. and there he was. i looked down at the pages. and then back up at him. and then back down again. i laughed.

there he was,

line after line, trait after trait, hope after hope. somehow, in trying to describe what i wanted, i had managed to capture so much of him. enough that i briefly entertained the possibility that perhaps the universe had listened, winked, and whispered, “here you go.”

he was my list. and more.

i realized then that i hadn’t written a fantasy. nor had i accidentally predicted a person. i had simply spent pages and pages trying to describe something much simpler. i wanted someone whose way of moving through the world matched the rhythm of my own. i wanted someone who mirrored me. i wanted to feel recognized. seen. known. inherently, without much effort. and i wanted to inherently know them back. i just didn’t know how to say it yet. so i wrote pages and pages and pages, intellectualized every emotion i could feel from every angle and imagined every trait the right man would embody. many many words to say i just really wanted to exist as myself in front of someone existing as themselves in front of me. to not need to translate. to not need to change.

and that is why i don’t know if i want my list anymore. which is weird, right? cause it was almost frighteningly accurate. all my ridiculous specifics were right there in front of me, my dream man served on a platter. and yet, somehow, that made it matter less. because with him, i completely forgot about it. i didn’t consult it. i didn’t revisit it every few weeks to check if we were still on track. i forgot there was anything to check at all. because everything i’d ever wanted, and everything i never knew i did, had come and found me, sat down beside me, when i wasn’t even looking. which is what undoes me the most. i spent so much time obsessing over the notes, only to discover that the notes mattered very little when the thing itself finally appeared.

which leaves me in a strange spot now. what exactly am i supposed to do with this information? if anything, finding him should have made me cling tighter to the list. i should’ve felt vindicated. triumphant, even. after all, there he was. proof that my absurd little document wasn’t so absurd after all. and that it really was just as incredible in the flesh as it seemed on paper.

but instead, i find myself caring less about the details. it’s not that i no longer want them, i do. but now that i’ve seen them all personified, i realize what they were in service of. i see the full picture they were trying to create. i know what they feel like. and i don’t know how to put any of it back into words. how do you check for “his mind tangles just as much as mine does”? how do i gauge “we stand eye to eye”? how must i write down “i don’t want to translate myself anymore”? these feelings are tougher to condense into neat bullet points than “he’s reassuring and dependable”. the list feels hollow now because without the depth of infinite ever-expansive reflections of mirrors standing face-to-face, it feels… incomplete. one dimensional. arbitrary.

some of this might also be cynicism. because there is something so deeply disorienting about meeting the personification of everything i’ve ever wanted, everything i could have hoped for and more, only to watch it not work out anyway. if i wasn’t this sad, i might have laughed. there is something so comical about it. all those years of trying to get it right. all that specificity. all those carefully gathered traits and hopes and feelings. and then there he was. and then still, despite all that, it didn’t work out. what confidence am i meant to place in the list now? what exactly was all that specificity buying me? i ended up just as let-down and heartbroken as i kept getting before being so specific about what i wanted.

which is a burden to place on a list of bullet points, sure. i wasn’t just trying to figure out what i wanted, i was trying to make sure i’d never end up here again. i thought if i was detailed enough, intentional enough, if i could articulate every green flag to keep an eye out for, perhaps i could save myself another heartbreak. beat the system and outsmart it. a sense-check to make sure my standards stayed high even when my mind was too giddy about someone to think rationally. but all those pages and pages were never going to protect me. they could point me due north. they couldn’t promise smooth roads.

i don’t know. perhaps that’s unfair. i wouldn’t have wanted him any less if i’d never discovered he checked every box. he was my list, but the list was never what made me fall so hard. if anything, rediscovering it and seeing how well he fit amused me. but i’ve spent so much time grieving him that i didn’t realize i was simultaneously also grieving everything i hoped the list materializing would mean. both losses are so closely entwined that i can no longer tell them apart. because, yes, he really is rare. i still think he is. there probably really is no other man like him out there. i would not expect there to be. people are not interchangeable. there isn’t another me either.

but in the depths of my heartbreak, i convinced myself that just because there would never be another him, there could also never be that feeling of being seen, of standing eye to eye with someone again. because if he was my list and more, then surely i used up my one chance. lightning doesn’t strike twice, after all. no one could possibly be that lucky. so alongside him and what we had and what we lost, my grief is the fear of needing to spend the rest of my life translating myself again. that i will forever be bending and folding into unnatural angles so another person who is not the embodiment of everything i could ever ask for can catch glimpses of me. that the effortless recognition was a one-time miracle. it sure did feel like it.

and so that is the baby step i need to learn to take. and so, i don’t want my list anymore. the hard way, yes, but i’ve figured out what the pages were really trying to say. i thought i’d find the one by narrowing down based on traits i could look for in people. i love where it led me, but that’s not what i miss after losing it. i will look for familiarity instead. the list adds details and angles and layers to something much simpler. unquestionable recognition. my reflection. not another version of me. not another version of him. not someone who thinks exactly how i do. just glimpses. little moments that make me think “i know that feeling. i know that hope. i know that ache. i know the pattern of your footsteps as you move through the world. my feet do that too.” because it seems like that’s all the list was ever really trying to lead me to. and now that i finally know what the real destination feels like, i don’t think i could ever un-know it.