Written on March 27, 2026
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I am not happy, generally. I am often distracted or thoughtless, and sometimes giddy or excited, and sometimes content or peaceful, or sometimes nostalgic or poignant. But never happy.
This morning, I have been drawing quick sketches of people on reddit asking to be drawn, 10-30 minutes each, for about 5 hours now. The most recent one I did was this one:
I am afraid to go darker (though it looks darker in person). I just love it so much. I think it perfectly captures her soul, a sense of innocent, naive, childish, wholesome peace. The kind everyone should experience.
My first two thoughts when I saw her was, “wow, she looks exactly like someone I know,” and, “wow, she’s so beautiful.” I don’t remember which one came first. It turns out she looks just like one of the librarians here.
Most of the time, when I draw people on reddit asking to be drawn, it’s just for practice, and it’s fun, but there’s a medium threshold for who I choose. I choose men who are handsome and women who are beautiful, and only when they’re in relatively still and calm poses, for some reason.
But I only see souls, I think. I have aphantasia, I think. When I close my eyes, I can picture people I recognize, but I can’t describe anything about their face. I can’t guess the size of their nose, the shape of their eyes, any of the proportions, nothing. Yet I can still see them.
I’m well aware that all of these things I’m saying sound odd, perhaps even weird or creepy. I don’t care. Part of living life is experiencing being human in its fullness. All of us are just humans.
After drawing her, I was so curious about this other human that I went through her reddit profile. And I came across some of her sketches about when she was apparently in a psych ward.
I got about halfway through, and all I could think was, “I understand this person! And she understands me!”
I’m not saying I’ve had these same particular experiences she’s venting about. But that there’s a deeper thing about being human. We’re all just trying to experience each other’s experience, and share our own experiences with each other.
But more importantly, many of us don’t feel loved. I think, probably, most of us don’t feel as loved as we need to.
But while I was reading that, I felt a strong sense of compassion for her, a sense of loving the human who experienced all of that. It was an undeniably intense emotion, yet very subtle. I wanted that person to be hugged by someone who they love and trust, and experience the love that comes from that experience.
And that feeling made me happy. When I finishd reading what she wrote, I legitimately teared up out of happiness.
This is, I think, the core of the gospel to me. I guess, following up from the post I wrote yesterday, when that guy asked me what the gospel was, because he was testing me (which in retrospect felt so deceitful and like a personal betrayal), my answer was more correct than his:
I am a Christian because nobody else has ever loved me, and Jesus was the first person to actually love me, selflessly and truly and entirely. And I felt that love when I first believed it to be true. And it made me happy. That was so very long ago though, and I don’t feel it anymore, either his love, or my happiness.
But I do feel happy when I feel love for others. So often, I have tried to chase after happiness with things I know don’t provide it. Every single time I try to make myself happy, it backfires, and I’m worse off for it. It never works.
Feeling loved makes me happy. But loving others also makes me happy, even if it’s as simple as an act of good will within my heart.
I wonder if this is where the cultural habit came from of wishing people a good morning. Maybe it was their serotonin fix centuries ago, and their descendents just carry on a dead tradition.
But most especially, loving someone who needs love, makes me happy. This is, I think, where I got my set of qualifications for a potential soulmate from. I think, in general, my heart yearns to love those who need love the most. People who have made mistakes, who perhaps think they don’t deserve love, or who maybe the world agrees don’t deserve love. These are the ones that call out to my heart, “love me!” and my soul responds “bet!”
It lines up with a verse that just came to mind, “we love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) So, I guess that’s a pretty cool little divine proof that my thoughts are on point.
Don’t get me wrong. None of what I’m saying implies anything creepy. I have thoughts like this all the time, about people on the train, at restaurants, people I see walking down the street, or even my friends, and these thoughts go as quickly as they come, and I forget about people as quickly as anyone else, unless they become a part of my life. I am just comfortable enough in my own innocent intentions to be vulnerable about my deepest thoughts here, especially knowing damn well nobody reads this thing.