I Didn’t Know This Was Inside Me

By Charlotte Houston, TIWP Student

If anyone ever makes you feel small, do remember you are vast and limitless.

The other day I learned that there is no storage capacity for our brains. I always thought that I needed to let go of useless information like my old best friend’s landline in order to make room for the more important things, like the formulas I need to memorize for my next math test. But one fact does not push out another. Our skull stops growing when the rest of our body does, but the space inside it is limitless. There is no cap on our long-term memory.

So if anyone ever makes you feel small, remind yourself instead of all the knowledge of small things that you hold inside of you. The fingernails on a newborn baby, the size of the moon outside your car window, how your voice sounds when your scared. You have filing cabinets stuffed full of small, stacks and stacks of it, drawers bursting with all of the small that you know of. You know small. You are not it.

You have layers and layers of thoughts and memories. You have reams of songs that you know by heart, infinite imprints of summer days, plotlines of countless books, baskets of all the nice things anyone has ever said to you. And registries of all the mean things, too.

So do not feel small. That is an oxymoron. Your head is bursting with loud sounds and favorite words and the beat of your mother’s heart and that weak feeling you get in your knees when you are standing at the edge of a precipice.

I have learned that there is more to me than I know. I know the way the sun rises through my blinds every new day and the way it resets my circadian rhythm and that I’m a morning person. I thought I knew me. But there are dark corners. Thoughts so untouched that they are almost forgotten. Dreams that I ignore on purpose.

There is more to me than I know. There is jealousy and a startling capacity for manipulation. There are my hurt feelings that I ignore the pangs of all day and nurse at night.

There are me’s I don’t know yet. Me’s I don’t want to know yet. Me’s that I don’t want to know ever.

But no one will ever know all of the things that you know. No one will know all your dark thoughts, or best intentions. No one will ever have the same arsenal of memories. I guess I never really understood the concept of the Big Bang Theory until today. How is the universe always growing, and where does it grow into? I didn’t realize that we are all our own universes. We are all a vast landscape of human experience, and we are only expanding.

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