For as long as I can remember, from the exact moment I realised that I was conscious I’ve been arguably one of the most sensitive people I know. Sensitive to smells and sounds, sensitive to the texture of  surfaces my hands touch and the food I place in my mouth, sensitive to taste and light, sensitive to people's feelings, habits and the way they communicate; sensitive of everything that exists and what I imagine they mean or the impact they're supposed to have.

In the same way that I am sensitive, I am also aware; so deeply aware of who I am, of my experiences and life's design.

I remember being in primary school and not being able to relate with my peers as everyone else did, I always felt like an oddball and as children do, they made me very aware that they knew I stuck out in the crowd and I wasn't truly one of them. 

This is something I've come to embrace about myself now but it obviously wasn't a very pleasant experience at the time. While all of these things ate at me, my “uniqueness” and isolation, my weirdness and anxiety, my hyper existentialist ideas and raving imaginations, I found comfort in poetry and so I started to write down my feelings. For a child, they were heavy.

My love for poetry led me to music. Whenever I would listen to songs about love and life I could fully immerse myself in the lyrics and tunes and live my life like it was written just for me. I was fascinated by sad songs and addicted to the way they made me feel, the heightened sensations I had experienced.

From music I started to enjoy films, and the themes I was most drawn to were romance, familial love and community and these three will eventually become core pillars in the foundation of what I would see as ideal in the future where the present me resides. I watched people share unconditional love for each other, the kind where they’re so recklessly and utterly finished in their feeling for one another; this was something I once aspired to have but the older I got the less tangible it became because I’m more aware of my individualism and that of others and I don’t think anybody could ever be completely finished in love with me.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not supposed to be a sad essay because when I started writing it I had no plans to share but the more I write, the more open I am to letting other people into this part of my mind.

Romantic love, familial connections and community are themes that have played out very differently in my life. I haven’t been privy to that unconditional, no-strings-attached type of relationship in my dealings with people and quite frankly that’s okay, the human experience was designed to be transactional and it would be an error on my part to expect any different. Unfortunately for all of us that’s what the media has sold to us, that these kinds of relationships were possible for everyone and only a few castaways don’t have this but I have reason to believe it’s the opposite.

I believe that the majority of the fold will have more transactional relationships than the fairy tales we’ve been fed, and that’s just fine if everybody chooses the transactions that best suit them.

Earlier today I was thinking about how in all of this some of us remain unwritten about, we’re never part of the big story. The spectators, those of us meant for watching, the storytellers, the extras, the side characters, those of us without. 

 Our stories have no depth, no records, and so they fade as quickly as the names well written on the beach sands once waves start to wash them back into itself. We also deserve to be spoken of, those of us that do not have soulmates, the “unlovables” we also deserve to be seen and not just carefully hidden away from the public eye because we exist. 

Those of us that would be dissatisfied with transactional relationships but have no prospects of a divine predestined human lovers, those of us that find soulmates in trees and waters, in languages and art, in music and culture, in peoples tattoos and traditional scars, in mountains and the sky, those of us whose souls remain unpaired and unattached. Those of us that are merely spectators in this life’s game, those of us journeying through life alone. 

The wanderers