This week has been an interesting slew of emotions exploding everywhere for me. This led to me having an identity crisis and spending a lot of time thinking about life and who I am. I ended up broadening this to what makes me human, and now I want to share my thoughts with all of you.

Most likely everyone has their own image of what humans are or should be. These images probably vary a lot from person to person, but humans are surprisingly a lot alike regardless of where they’re from, what they believe in, or what they look like. They all have various talents and skills. They all have various goals, aspirations, and dreams. They want to be happy. They have the potential for creating great beauty in this world just by being themselves. And, most importantly, they’re a fucking mess. We as humans go through so many problems on a daily basis that sometimes I feel like it’s a miracle we’re even alive. What’s cool about people, though, is that we have somehow found a way to live while being beautiful and sick. Whether that be something like waking up feeling ridiculously tired with horrendous bed head but still smiling because you’re going to visit friends you haven’t seen in years or watching a beloved furry friend depart this life but rejoicing in the beauty that little dog created while he was alive (RIP Gabe the bork doggo). I think this balance and resilience is fundamental to being human.

So I’m a biologist, and if you’ve ever taken a biology class, you may have heard the term homeostasis before. Essentially this is a process in which cells try and maintain a state of balance and equilibrium in their environment. In biology, we also talk about how the micro level influences the macro level, and I feel that homeostasis is no exception to this principle. Humans and even the whole planet constantly strive to find balance in this crazy universe of ours. We constantly go through plight after plight but still manage to make something beautiful out of it in the end, and I think that’s amazing.

Another facet of being human is also the awareness that you’re a beautiful mess and knowing that it makes you human. It’s a struggle to make sense of all of it sometimes though because it really shouldn’t make sense that so much beauty and disaster can occur all within one human being. In the words of Icon for Hire from their song Happy Hurts, “Can the two coexist? The beauty next to the mess? Because I swear I have them both already beating in my chest. And if that makes me crazy, the numbers don’t lie, but I don’t call that crazy, I call it being alive.” Being human means being a beautiful specimen of life as well as a horrible disaster. We all find our balance at different times and in different ways, but that’s all part of this glorious journey of being human.