Anicca

There is something extremely absurd about feeling understood by someone who doesn’t even know you exist. We grow up expecting recognition from the people closest to us. We expect people in our life like our parents, partners, friends, the small circle that are witnesses to our lives. Yet, they are the ones that have made me feel invisible all my life. The people closest to me seems to understand and have sympathy/empathy for everyone they come into contact with, except for me. I only recently realised that sometimes it arrives from somewhere entirely unexpected. In my case, it came through the music of Min Yoongi, a stranger whose lyrics managed to articulate thoughts and personal experiences that I hadn’t yet found the language for. 


I find myself reflecting less on the celebrity he has become and more on the strange, quiet comfort of being understood by someone from a completely different demographic and from a different part of the world. My wish for him is that he continues to live well: healthy, surrounded by the people he loves, and still making the kind of music that reaches and helps strangers for years to come.

Alone on the Seesaw

The first time I understood the metaphor in Seesaw, it made me quite uncomfortable. A seesaw only works if both sides are participating. If one person stops pushing, the other can keep trying for a while, but eventually the imbalance becomes obvious and takes a toll on the one left of the seesaw. Relationships work the same way. There is a strange inertia in unequal relationships. You keep trying to push the rhythm back into motion, convinced that if you just try a little harder the balance will return. But it requires a moment of clarity that delivers the realisation that the other person had stepped off the seesaw a long time ago and the only real choice you have left is to get off it too.

I wish I had heard Seesaw few years sooner. It could have saved me a lot of time, energy and wasted efforts. But the thing is that now that I know it, I can not unsee the metaphor and that will probably save me a lot of wasted efforts in the future.

Only way out is forward

Then there is Never Mind. The line most people quote is the one that sounds like a motivational for the gym freaks:

If you feel like you’re going to crash, accelerate more, you fool.

There are moments in life where you realise that there can be no elegant exit from a certain situation. That there is no way left for a graceful retreat. The only way out of the cycle is to just push forward with all your might. It doesn’t matter if you are confident about landing safely. What matters is breaking the cycle, even if it means that you risk crashing out.


The song doesn’t promise that pushing forward will feel good or even make sense at the time. It simply recognises that survival sometimes looks like acceleration when stopping would be easier. 
But what always struck me about the song is that it felt like an acknowledgment of the toll that it takes on a person who is caught in a spiral.

Remembering why you chose the path

Ambition has a strange way of exhausting people who once pursued it with joy. Somewhere between the beginning and the middle of any difficult path, fatigue creeps in. The world has plenty of advice about pushing harder to achieve what you want. But very few talk about remembering why you started. And, even fewer talk about how important it is to stop, rest and to recollect yourself from time to time.

Snooze is that reminder for people stuck hustling everyday that rest is not betrayal. Pausing does not mean abandoning the path. Sometimes it simply means giving yourself enough room to continue walking down the path you have chosen for yourself without having to deal with burn out. In a culture that glorifies constant productivity, this reminder is more radical than it sounds.

The weight of what wasn’t said/done

Grief looks different to each individual, but what is common in every case is that it attaches itself to all the unanswered questions. Grief forces you to replay conversations that never happened (or conversations that should have happened differently), moments that might have gone differently, and even the choices that (you think of in hindsight) could have changed the ending.

For years I carried the quiet guilt of losing someone I loved and wondered if things might have unfolded differently if I had understood the situation that the person was in more, noticed more, had done more. The song, Dear my Friend, said some of them out loud for me and helped me understand some of my own emotions that I couldn’t really understand or put it into words before.

And sometimes hearing a thought expressed clearly by someone who has no stake in your life is enough to loosen its hold on you. It is enough to make you see the guilt you have been carrying from a different perspective.

Facing the past without becoming it

Trauma can shape a life in two very different ways. It can become a lens through which everything is interpreted, a permanent identity built around what happened. Or it can become something that is acknowledged, processed, and eventually integrated into a larger story. Amygdala leans toward the second path.

The song does not deny pain, nor does it minimize it. But it refuses to let trauma become a permanent excuse or a defining narrative. There is quiet strength in the idea that difficult experiences deserve to be processed and that healing is not about pretending the past didn’t matter. Actual strength lies in refusing to let the trauma dictate everything that follows.




Proof that healing is possible

Then there is The Last. It is another song that doesn’t pretend that the past wasn’t difficult (see the theme of August D yet?) or that success erases all the struggle that led to the success. But it provides proof that healing is possible even when the starting point is messy, complicated, and painful. Not perfect healing. Just progress and sometimes that is the only believable kind of hope.

Expression as survival

One of the things that continues to strike me about Yoongi’s work is how deliberately he processes his thoughts through music.

Life is messy and not everything resolves neatly. But the act of expression itself becomes a way of moving through the world. Listening to his music and watching his process made me realize something about my own life.

For me, expression once had a different form: dance. Like many people, I drifted away from it over time. Life showed me so many aspects that I still have a block in my mind which has been very difficult to get over. I have been at it for 2 years and almost gave up so many times. But seeing Yoongi treat art not as a language reminded me that expression is not optional for some of us. It is how we process all our experiences. And returning to that language begins simply by remembering that it exists for me too and that I just need to find my way back.

Power of silence

There is also something interesting about the way certain public figures handle chaos. Both Min Yoongi and  Shah Rukh Khan do it well, in their own way. Both share a quality that is increasingly rare: the ability to remain calm in environments designed to provoke reaction. What most people do not realise is that silence, in those moments, is dignity. It is a refusal to participate in noise that doesn’t deserve your attention. Watching that kind of composure reminds you that grace is not loud. Sometimes it simply means standing still while letting the world spin and spiral around you.

Freedom of not explaining yourself

One of the quieter lessons I’ve taken from Yoongi’s work has nothing to do with music itself. It is the fact that not everything we do needs to be explained and neither do we need to explain away our experiences. Not every decision requires public understanding or people’s validation. And often the most convincing explanation for your choices is simply the work you produce or how you decide to live your life.

Let your work speak

That brings me to something else both Yoongi and Shah Rukh understand instinctively: the work should carry the conversation. There is a temptation, especially in the age of social media, to constantly narrate your intentions, justify your choices, and explain your path. But sometimes the most powerful statement is the one that is never spoken. You show up, build something and then let the work speak.

All of this leads back to the strange premise I started with. Understanding does not come from people who are close. More often it is art that makes you feel seen. Sometimes a stranger articulates something you have been carrying silently for years. Not because they know your story, but because they have walked close enough to similar path to recognise it.

That recognition is very comforting because it explains everything that you have been trying to express. It reminds you that you are not alone in the things you felt, the things you survived, and the things you’re still trying to understand.