368. awe

There are certain moments that affect me more than I know how to explain. For most of my life, I didn’t know what to do with that part of myself, or why it affected me the way it did. The moments don’t feel sad in any obvious way, and they are not attached to pain, loss, or grief. The feeling is closer to being overwhelmed by something beautiful or sincere, as if something I usually keep buried is suddenly brought close enough to the surface to recognize. It is a strange kind of emotion because I have been so conditioned to think that becoming emotional means something is wrong, like it must be tied to pain or loss. But this doesn't feel like I am being hurt. It feels like I am being reminded.

The moments that do this to me usually have something to do with acceptance, love, belonging, or the sudden realization of what someone means to another person. It can happen in a movie when the emotional truth of a relationship finally becomes clear, like when someone realizes they were loved, or when a scene turns in a way that changes the entire weight of what came before it. It can happen when a singer stops mid-song only to have the crowd continue singing every word back to them. For a few seconds, the person who created the song is standing there almost stunned while thousands of people carry it for them. Something about that kind of moment reaches me in a way almost nothing else does because it shows a level of connection that modern life rarely makes room for.

For my entire life, I thought this meant I was too emotional, too sensitive, or too easily moved. I was embarrassed to feel moved. I treated that response as something I needed to explain away because it didn’t fit with how I felt I was expected to show up in the world. There is very little room for reverence anymore, for that quiet, overwhelming sense that something in front of us matters more than we can fully explain. We are expected to choose control over vulnerability, logic over wonder, productivity over presence, and independence over interconnection. Life becomes something to manage, optimize, and prove, while the unquantifiable experiences that actually make us feel more alive are treated as distractions from the “real” work of everyday life.

I think the feeling I am describing is awe. It is the moment when something reaches beyond the ordinary scale of your day and opens you up to the larger interconnectedness of life. It can happen looking up at a night sky, in music, in movement, in art, or in simply witnessing a moment of human connection that feels more honest than the world usually allows. Awe pulls us out of the cramped room of our own thoughts and reminds us that there are parts of life that cannot always be measured, monetized, explained, or reduced to usefulness.

And I think that is why those moments hit me the way they do. They remind me of the things I deeply want and rarely admit with the same clarity: to love, to be loved, to belong, to feel that my presence matters, and to experience life as something more than survival or achievement. The shame I have felt around being moved by those things probably says more about the world I have learned to survive in than it says about the feeling itself.

Modern life has a way of hardening people while calling it maturity. It teaches us to become more productive, independent, logical, self-contained, and less available to the very things that make life meaningful. It sells us the conditions of isolation and then offers us products, status, and achievement as substitutes for connection. Somewhere in that process, many of us learn to distrust the parts of ourselves that are still soft enough to be moved.

I am starting to believe those moments that spark emotion inside of me are not embarrassing interruptions. They are signs of something in me that has not been completely buried. They are light coming through the cracks in the harder version of myself I thought I had to become. They remind me that passion, love, beauty, and belonging carry a kind of value that modern life keeps trying to make us forget, and maybe the part of me that gets overwhelmed by those moments is the part that still remembers what matters.