People have always fascinated me. The way they are, the way they think, the way they speak. I was just a child when I started observing and analyzing the people around me. Over time, it became a habit, and I learned to read people easily. From a glance. From small changes in their voice, their gestures, their silences.
I was so fascinated by people that many times I felt like I was stepping into their world and feeling what they felt. Of course, many of those feelings were created by my own mind. I analyzed, created scenarios, and ended up experiencing them as if they were real. But for a long time, that was my world. My hidden pleasure. To observe people. To feel them.
Maybe that is why I never truly saw people as beautiful or ugly, fat or skinny. I only saw them as different. Unique. Complex. Human beings carrying an inner world, not just a body standing in front of me.
But by stepping so deeply into the worlds of others, I slowly lost my own. I constantly felt what others were feeling. I carried emotions that were never mine. And little by little, I lost myself.
It took me many years to realize that I had spent so much time looking outward that I had completely forgotten to look inward.
In 2019, for the first time, I felt something inside me breaking apart. There was so much pain in me that I spent a month and a half lying in bed with such intense vertigo that I could barely turn from one side to the other without getting sick.
That was the moment life forced me to sit with myself.
And because the only thing I could still do was listen, I slowly began discovering a world I had ignored for years: my inner world. The strange thing is that it had always been there. It had simply been covered by the noise of the mind and everyday life.
In 2021, when I lost my brother, I became angry with God. I could not accept that the purest soul I had ever known could leave this world so suddenly. He loved every flower. He smiled at the sun. He spoke from the soul. He was one with nature.
That was when I closed my heart. I no longer wanted to love flowers, trees, or the sound of birds singing. To me, they belonged to Marius, and when he left, they left with him.
That was the pain inside me speaking.
After years of therapy and inner work, I had already learned to observe the mechanisms of the mind. But I still did not understand that those mechanisms were not me.
In 2023, I went through an experience that pushed me even deeper inward. An experience that completely changed the way I see myself and the world around me.
Since then, maybe I have become a little strange. Or maybe just more honest about who I truly am.
I started observing my ego. The way it hides behind fear, behind the need for control, behind suffering, or even behind the image we create of ourselves. And I realized how easily we can get lost in our own stories without even noticing.
Since learning to look inward, I have also learned not to lose myself in other people anymore. When people speak, I no longer automatically enter their emotional state. I also observe what is happening inside me.
I know tomorrow will be a new day. I no longer chase dreams or answers. Today, I simply enjoy what is here. Suffering still appears sometimes, but it comes and goes. I no longer build endless scenarios in my mind.
And all the struggles I have lived through, all my questions, all the moments I fought with God, I see differently today. They brought me to my knees only so I could finally learn to see myself too.
And maybe that is what I am truly trying to say through all these words: sometimes we get so lost in people and in the noise around us that we forget to notice what is happening inside ourselves.
And when we finally begin listening to ourselves too, something very simple appears.
More peace.