6. Keep your feet on the ground when your head's in the clouds

Sometimes I wish I could just disappear into the background. It’ll happen in the middle of some kind of social event, maybe a dinner or a party where everyone is talking to each other and having fun. It’ll suddenly strike me how much I am lying to myself. How much I am pretending just so no one asks me questions or worse, asks if I'm OK 

I would feel so alone in a room full of people and so tired with so much energy around me. Something pulls at my heart. Well, it’s more like some dark pit in the depths of my stomach. I feel this intense longing to just fade in with the shadows, melt into the walls and pretend I’m not really there. But I am.

 So I’ve perfected the facade of acting like I’m present when really my mind’s in a completely different world. It’s quite easy once you know how. You watch and look even if you’re not truly seeing. When someone says something witty and everyone laughs, you crack a smile and laugh along even if you have absolutely no idea what just happened. When their faces are serious, you give the occasional nod towards the speaker or look like you're concentrating. If half the people are laughing but the other half aren’t, just smile.

 And when they ask you questions, give them the answer they want to hear, short, sweet, and subtly add in a new topic for them to become distracted on. They'll probably end up concluding that you're a bland, dull, slow-witted person, and, well, maybe I am.

The trick is bringing yourself back. You have to know how to reconnect yourself so that you don't completely lose touch with reality. Because once you do, there's no pretending anymore, it becomes real. And you don't want it to be real.

4. Settle petal

I'm quite a settled soul. I’m not sure if it’s my soul exactly-maybe it’s my spirit, but I know that there is a very big part of me that possesses the ability and the desire to simply be alone and think and look and be calm. It might have something to do with the chaotic, never-ending mess that is my mind. I’m constantly thinking about a thousand things at once and if I don’t take time out to step back and just think, I start to get very panicked and even just doing everyday things suddenly becomes unbearable. It probably comes with being an introvert.

I think this is why I’m never really bored. And how awkward silences don’t actually bother me as much as I pretend they do. Because even though on the outside, not much may be happening and to someone else it might look dull and unexciting, the inside of my mind is constantly spinning and buzzing and I get never ending entertainment within my own thoughts.

And I like watching. I like sitting and observing things around me. Especially people. If I could sit on a train all day and just watch the strangers who come on and off, I would. I would find out their quirks, the little things they do that they've become so used to that they themselves don't even notice. But this is the first time I've ever seen them in my whole life and I get to see them with brand new eyes, with no preconceptions or expectations. The way they check their watches twice because they weren't paying attention the first time or how they run their fingers along the pages of the books they’re reading or if they walk with their shoulders back or their head low. Then I would start trying to work them out without ever having spoken to them. I would look at them as more than strangers. I realise that they’re just like me. Minds alive.

I wonder about  where they’re going, if they're angry at someone, hurting over lost love. Then I start to think about how they’re feeling and if they’re regretful or relieved or anxious or angry. And then, after watching all these strangers, I feel sad because I realised I’ll never get to meet these people however fascinating or lovely or just like me they are. 

3. seven billion

"She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib’s end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

- Atonement, Ian McEwan"

My brain can't comprehend that there are more than 7 billion minds in the world today, much less that there are 7 billion minds who are as real and alive as mine is to me. It's incredibly difficult to put into perspective the thought that these people have minds that work in wondrous ways that I will never know of just because they are not mine. I'm an intuitive person and it's quite easy for me to empathise with others. But feelings and emotions are so different to the actual workings of a mind just because it's impossible to ever think in way that wasn't purposely thought of by yourself. I'm not making sense.

I started thinking about how there are so many unique and creative and special minds and yet we don't make the effort to know as much as we can. We are all so stuck in our own worlds, so determined to figure things out in our own way and we're convinced we know best. But we don't. It frightens me just how much knowledge and wisdom other people have and how amazingly rich my own thoughts would be if only I could learn a little bit from every person I meet.

This is not just the writer in me dribbling on, or even the idealist. This is the human speaking, shouting, I want to learn! I want to be inspired by their stories, I want to learn from their mistakes and admire their achievements. I want to hear them spoken from their own lips or written in their own handwriting and I want them to share it with the world.

Because what is a world with 7 billion people and everyone keeping what they know to themselves? How can we even sit here, in a classroom, in an office, going through slow, dull routine, learning the same things, being tested the same way when we are quite clearly not the same people.

There is a whole world out there full of exciting, different minds who know things you don't and don't know things you know very well.

While it may take a bit more time for my little brain to really wrap around the notion that there are other brains just as alive as mine (thanks Ian), I do know now that I want to learn and I want to do so through the amazing people I share this crazy world with.