The Things You Can't Unsee
There's a part of this that feels heavier to sit with.
Some things, once you see them, don't go away.
They don't fade back into innocence.
They stay. And they start shaping how you see everything else.
I noticed this when I started paying attention to patterns behind information.
News, content, narratives... at some point it stopped being just information.
I began to see structure behind it.
Who benefits. What keeps attention. What gets amplified and what doesn't.
And once that layer becomes visible, it doesn't disappear.
Even when I want it to.
But what I didn't expect was this...
That lens doesn't stay where it belongs.
It follows me into places that are just human.
Moments that don't need analysis start getting analyzed.
Conversations that don't need decoding start getting decoded.
And sometimes I catch myself stepping back from a moment instead of being inside it.
As if everything has to be understood before it can be felt.
And there have been moments where that has bothered me.
Moments where I wondered if I missed something simple.
Something real.
Like someone's kindness...
because I was busy seeing patterns.
There's a strange cost to awareness.
You gain clarity in one place, and lose softness in another.
And I don't know where the balance is yet.