Things are hard right now. After a very busy summer, I, like many others, have been sent reeling by the death of Shuhada’ Sadaqat (known professionally as Sinéad O’Connor). Without being consciously aware of it, she has formed a part of the soundtrack of my life since before my birth. As a revolutionary and wave-making cultural phenomenon in my home country of Ireland, as well as an icon and spiritual ally to my rule breaking mother, I was always going to be introduced to Sinéad early.

Her first record, The Lion and the Cobra, came out four years before I was born and yet, my mother tells me that she played Sinéad’s songs to me while I was still growing inside her body. She had long-since amalgamated that haunting, rageful, hair-raising voice into her DNA after years of repeated listening — with songs of revolution and resurrection like Troy played over and over. In a very real way, Sinéad has been a beloved intergenerational teacher and friend to me before I even took my first breath. It’s hard to believe she has taken her last.

It makes me wonder now: how much of her spirit can I credit with who I am?

The fire of rebellion, the rejection of injustice, the defiance of authority that seemed to live in me long before I had even fully comprehended what it all meant. She has been woven through the foundations of my existence, and that of so many others across the world, in a way in which can never be untangled.

I spent some of my formative years in the 90s growing up in Dalkey, a place Sinéad has also called home. My mother, then a single freelance journalist with three small children, remembers desperately trying to send a late fax in the village one day, my little sister in the buggy, while Sinéad’s daughter Róisín relentlessly attempted to clamber from her own buggy, pushed by her father (also a local journalist trying to send a fax), on top of my sister’s unknowing head. A funny and serendipitous moment, and a small reminder of how connected we all are (perhaps especially on this tiny island).

I was not expecting to be so impacted by the loss of this artist I never personally knew. Yet, we do not know how many people have had a hand in the making of us and I wonder if that is part of the reason why it is often the griefs we do not see coming that hit us the hardest.

I think the reason why this particular loss hurts so much for so many of us (especially here in Ireland) is that Sinéad embodied and transmuted our collective pain into defiance through art and protest.

And what is defiance but love with its teeth bared?

She loved us, she heard us, she fought for us — as few others could (or would).

She has left a tangible absence behind her. Yet nature abhors a vacuum — it cannot exist for long because, in her death, all the compassion and power and defiance she held in her being has dispersed in a plume of wind-strewn seeds.

Spirit is perennial and I have no doubt that those seeds will find the soil they need to grow.

I have included some prose and a piece of recent digital art below because this is what I have been focusing my time on lately. Mainly because creativity (often at the expense of all else) is how I process. I have other things vying for attention within my mind and body, so my art is about many things. Yet, I can hear Sinéad’s voice through my own, through so many other people also grieving her loss; a howl of defiance and love, a primal scream spun into the spaces between our breaths.

This is how death is transcended.

The cost of perfection

We are a people perpetually sick and starving in this sanitised existence we have inherited.

Yet, there is food, medicine, still growing free between the cracks in the concrete, in the walls, fed through living fungal networks humming beneath the foundations of our homes, infused through every square inch of soil.

The weeds, as they call them, remain incorrigible and undefeated amid the onslaught of our worst chemical warfare, despite our most violent hatred of their wild defiance, their eternal sun-seeking, their roots that pop through our careful brickwork and warp our dead roads.

And to our horror, they seem to do this with a relentless kind of delight. A joy that many of us, perhaps, both crave and fear. We resent such exuberant aliveness, such forgetfulness of the self; we are mortified by it.

It is untidy. It is out of control. It is ugly.

Perhaps, it was never about the flowers at all.

In frenzied fury, we cut, cut, burn. We poison the very earth itself, anything, anything, not to see. Yet still, despite it all, they grow and they grow.

They bloom perennially and in doing so mercilessly reveal to us our own wild parts, the parts of us which are perpetually out of our control, the untended parts of us we fear.

(Fear, which is itself the oily core of hatred).

They dare to remind us that to live is to struggle and bloom anyway, they whisper to us of our nearing deaths and of the brief passage of the seasons.

And perhaps worst of all, they show us that it is not remembering ourselves that brings us to life, but in forgetting ourselves completely.

They offer us the choice we most fear:

will you stay a cold knot of potential safe beneath the ground, watertight, impervious, and perfect,

or will you unfurl yourself in unapologetic vibrance, full in the face of life and all its pain, knowing that in so doing, you will also dance and laugh with abandon in the arms of your death?

Do you even know yet

            all the ways you could be seen?

If you would like to support my art, you can purchase a high resolution downloadable version of this piece at my Etsy store, Wild Sive Designs.

Yesterday was Sinéad O’Connor’s funeral.

I couldn’t make it to the ceremony in Bray so sharing my grief and putting more art into the world, as Sinéad did so relentlessly throughout her life, is my way of honouring her.

Sleep well, wild one — thank you for hearing us.

Note: I refer to Shuhada’ Sadaqat (her chosen name) as Sinéad throughout this piece in order to tell the story through the lens of my personal relationship to her as an artist and with her music throughout her professional career, for which she retained the use of her birth name. However, I want to make space to honour and celebrate that Shuhada’ Sadaqat was her preferred personal name.

It had been a beautiful day.

I had walked for hours on the beach in Dublin Bay with my binoculars and counted the shorebirds, my consistent and ever-vigilant companions. I had seen boldly coloured oystercatchers, always one of the first to send up an alarm call when I wandered too close to the flock. I had seen long-legged godwits plunging their slightly upturned beaks into the wet flank of the shore, while a hundred tiny dunlins wheeled across my path, their wings collectively stirring a push of air before them that momentarily stunned me into complete stillness.

And, just as the sun cracked like an egg on the rim of the Dublin Mountains, I had seen one of the most iconic winter sights of all: a large skein of brent geese carving their cross-shaped bodies like fletched arrows through the cold sky, interrupting the still of the evening with the bright shock of their laughing call.

It is the new moon and I have never seen the tide so low.

For the first time in my life, I had walked all the way from the West Pier to the Poolbeg Chimneys, halfway across the entire bay, entirely on the strand. I passed four suburban towns along the way, walking a wild parallel to my own life. I hadn’t even been forced to wade through a single tide pool, although I did have to leap hugely across a few streams that determinedly sliced their liquid bodies through the firm flesh of the sand.

Now, hours later, while waiting for the train home, with darkness creeping its giant body across the smooth surface of the day, an announcement crackles to life over the station speakers. It informs the sparse collection of bodies speckling the platform that there had been a rugby match in the Aviva Stadium that is causing unavoidable delays. It is also rush hour, when the city bursts itself open and gushes back into the catchment sprawl of suburbia and the surrounding commuter towns.

A collective groan rumbles around the platform, disturbing the stillness that had been collecting on my skin all day in tiny quaking beads of silver liquid, gathering into smooth pools behind my collar bones and the crooks of my elbows. I have never found it easy to carry the immediacy of nature with me into urban spaces. As hard as I have tried to hold onto the feeling of ease and belonging that it brings me, time after time, I step onto the concrete and watch as it spills through my cupped palms like water.

When the train finally arrives, the carriage is swimming with bodies; a compressed ocean of people left with no choice but to breathe each other in.

In preparation for the onslaught of sensory hell that I know will ensue on this journey, I take my noise-cancelling headphones from my bag and put them on as I step inside. I am immediately pressed against the doors as they close behind me by the swell of limbs and bags and breath. It is too late to turn back and all I can do is hold every aching muscle in my tired body rigid, focusing every fraction of my attention on maintaining a thin layer of empty space around my skin.

With effort, I turn my body slowly to face the dark window, doing my best not to brush off anyone as I move. I expand my mind and allow my attention to fill it, infusing my entire being with the orange glow of the streetlights as they whip by outside, filtering out the ghostly rows of reflected faces staring back at me from inside the carriage.

Every hair on my body stands on end in anticipation of being touched.

If it had still been bright out, I might have considered waiting on the platform for the rush to dissipate, as I had done many times before, but it is January and it would likely mean waiting an hour or more with the frigid air clawing at my face and hands, seeping its damp body through my clothes.

My skin and eyes are full of the fresh sea air and I am tired. I want to go home.

I have finally managed to control my breathing when the train eases into the next stop and the doors grate open to reveal a new tide of waiting bodies. They surge forward as one and I am momentarily pinioned between the oncoming wave before me and the crush at my back.

Within seconds, and without warning, two large hands materialise from behind me. They grasp me firmly by the shoulders and pull me backward, causing me to lose my balance. Once I am off centre, I am forcibly shoved aside. I stumble against a shocked-looking couple and apologise to them as they right me. I look back to where I had just been standing, shock slightly loosening my jaw and rounding my eyes into orbs, as a large, middle-aged man emerges into the space that my body had been occupying only a moment before.

He is now purposefully using his bulk to carve a path to the doors, barreling through the wave of people desperately trying to force their own bodies onto the already overstuffed carriage. He knocks me back again with his shoulder on the way, this time into the arms of some other strangers behind me. There is nowhere for my body to move, except into the space of other people.

It is now clear to me that this is targeted and I am unsure how to react without escalating things, but my nervous system has gone into full fight-or-flight at being touched by multiple people and I begin to shiver imperceptibly inside my thick coat. I feel a familiar tug as my mind slips gently out of my body. My throat contracts and I am aware that I have lost the ability to speak.

As soon as the train had pulled into the station, I had already been overwhelmed at the sight of the crowd on the platform, wondering if I could cope with the increased weight of humanity inside the little fluorescent box which was already setting my heightened senses into overdrive.

In that split second before the doors parted, I had decided to alight, having quickly calculated the increased risk of being touched or contracting Covid against the risk of getting off at this dimly lit station several stops before my own and waiting for the next train.

The dangers of being a woman travelling alone are never far from my mind, but all I knew in that moment is that I felt far less safe standing among this throng of people than I ever would standing alone in the darkness.

That chance is lost now.

It is too late to try to squeeze myself to the door amidst the press of new bodies pouring in from the platform, and I am not willing to use force in the effort. Whatever slim chance I had to remove myself from the situation has been forcibly taken by this man.

He looks harshly back in my direction as he pushes himself roughly out the door, his shiny cheeks blotched pink in fury. He is gesturing animatedly toward my head and mouthing the word “headphones” as he steps out into the darkness.

At this, I feel a wave of familiar despair and a new kindling of quiet rage as my shock and confusion immediately dissipate to be replaced by a perfect clarity. I slam heavily back into my body.

So that’s it.

This man believes that I am responsible for his actions, that he is perfectly justified in however he chooses to behave toward me, and what’s more, I deserve it, because I have committed the offense of wearing my headphones in public. The very same headphones which are the only thing that allow me to exist in this space at all without experiencing profound sensory pain and discomfort. What I already know from a lifetime of similar experiences has once again been made painfully apparent.

I have been targeted for having visible access needs.

My invisible disability had become briefly visible, yet still not quite visible enough to deserve understanding or accommodation. Instead, only just audacious enough, just transgressive enough of the neurotypical norms of “polite society”, to attract and warrant forceful correction in the eyes of this man.

Perhaps he had first said “excuse me”, or some other less delicate way of using his voice, before he decided to force the issue (I will never know), but hearing him would not have magically granted me, or anyone else in the carriage, the ability to clear a path. There had been plenty of other people in this man’s way, also unable to move within the crush of bodies, standing between him and the carriage doors, but he had chosen my body to violently displace. I am the one who’s right to personal space, he determined, was less important than his inconvenience, simply because I was the one wearing headphones.

What’s more, he felt entitled enough in his own estimation of the situation to deem this an unacceptable fault worthy of aggressive physical intervention, with no fear of consequences despite the public nature of the act.

Now, as his form shrinks into the dark of the platform, perhaps feeling righteous in his actions, perhaps feeling the bitter relief of an outlet for whatever anger lives within him, I feel a new sense of calm settle over me. In a spontaneous impulse to reject this narrative he has laid before me, I flip up my middle finger and let the silent gesture follow him into the night.

Beneath the familiar numbing weight of my perceived otherness, that uniquely unsettling feeling of unwelcomeness that has drifted over my form like a damp blanket, I am vaguely aware that others are likely to have witnessed me making this gesture within the well-lit, crowded carriage. This is something that would have brought me a feeling of shame in the past, as it had done my entire life any time I expressed anything resembling anger at the violation of my bodily autonomy, any time I had been reprimanded or dismissed for exercising my right to take up space in the world as myself, with my different and additional needs visible for all to see.

I realise now, with some surprise, that I no longer care in the slightest what they might think about my anger. I have spent far too long caring far too much about the way others might perceive me, not out of vanity, but in order to maintain my safety.

It is clear to me now that nothing, nothing, is worth living that way anymore.

This is made all the more real to me because I know that attempting to hide my differences will not protect me either.

Not long after my late diagnosis of autism at the age of 30, I read an article where I learned that the average life expectancy of people like me is roughly half that of the general population, with one study putting it as low as 36.

This is largely due to the astronomical suicide rates within the autisic community (with the results of one recent UK study even finding that many people who have died by suicide are actually likely to have been undiagnosed autistics), compounded by the too often fatal health implications of systemic social exclusion, abuse and neglect. This was a devastating realisation to have to come to terms with, especially after the post-diagnosis euphoria of finally finding a community to which I belong.

I was not just upset that my risk of dying prematurely by so many different means was higher than average, but because it brought home to me the true scale of the daily impacts of discrimination, the lack of basic supports and accommodations, and the devastating pain of identity erasure and forced assimilation on neurodivergent people (and other, often overlapping, minority groups) within our society.

A society which supposedly belongs to us too, that we are supposed to belong to.

The cold systemic disregard for people like me felt like a vast and strange kind of grief to grapple with. The realisation of the enormity of systemic oppression, and the millions of insidious ways that it penetrates your life, can feel like a vast maw of loneliness to be suddenly, unceremoniously pitched into — especially when the stigma connected with being who you are is so profound that most people find it difficult to even begin to grasp what you are talking about.

The truth is that I won’t be able to keep myself safe through the excruciating practice of camouflaging my autistic traits and needs, or “masking” as it has been termed in the neurodiversity movement. The mental, emotional and physical strain it causes to daily perform in a way in which I am not wired to means that, in a very real way, I would only be putting myself at greater risk.

So, this is the moment.

Standing amid the crush of bodies, every nerve inside me still screaming from the unwanted touch of a stranger, this is the moment where I no longer feel able to accept the narrative of my difference, my disability in the context of this society, being inconvenient to others.

Instead, I choose to wholeheartedly reject the assumption that my visible access needs somehow equate permission for me to have my boundaries broken and my bodily autonomy forfeited at the self-righteous alter of another, all in the service of a sanctimonious “norm”, which I will never be able to attain.

Here, the unwritten Golden Rule of society is clearly visible to anyone who has ever experienced what it is to be considered “different”, as it has always been to me as far back as I can remember.

Conform, or be destroyed.

By this rule, any person who has conformed is accepted and, as such, becomes an actor of the Social Order, with automatic permission to treat those who have not, or more often, cannot, conform to societal expectation, however they deem fit. Their decisions are often endorsed, due to their perceived “normality”, by those around them, and so, by society itself.

They may have followed this rule because it was easy for them, already fitting into the extremely narrow image of what is considered “typical” (having never been given reason to question their own right to exist in the world). Or, perhaps more insidiously, and perhaps more often, because they have had their own difference stamped out of them by that same system and now spend their lives ensuring no one else can have the acceptance which they were denied. Either way, the harm done to those who do not have the ability, or the desire, to conform is the same.

Today, at last, I will not accept the shame this man is offering; I know that shame too well already. Indeed, I know this man too well already. I hand his offering back to him with my flippant gesture and, with it, a hundred thousand offerings which came before it.

I wish him well on his journey, I wish him the consequences of his own actions, and let it all go with him into the night.

This man, with his small mind and his unwavering belief in his entitlement to take up space, even at the expense of others, will not deprive me of my right to exist, with all of my human needs, in the shared spaces of the world to which everyone should have a right to belong.

With this, I decide that I am here to stay, even if the simple fact of my existence is viewed as an act of rebellion.

As the train moves off, I take a breath, let it out slowly, and remind myself that I have had a beautiful day.

In a society seemingly designed to wring us dry of every last drop of authenticity and uniqueness, I will not relinquish the beauty of this day, nor my right to exist in it.

When they try to tell me not to exist at all, I will resist by doing more than existing. Despite it all, in this moment, I decide that simply surviving, as hard as even that may be sometimes, isn’t enough anymore.

Others within that train carriage, as it hurtles along the south Dublin coastline, see a person wearing noise-cancelling headphones, quietly avoiding eye contact and staring into space. Within me, old empires are crashing to their knees in a deafening cacophony of dust and destruction.

In their place, I persist: a living, breathing revolution.

• To learn more about the link between autism and suicide please click here.
• For more information about early mortality in autistic people, you can check out this report by the UK-based autism research charity, Autistica.
• If you find value in my work and would like to support me, feel free to clap for and share this article. I would also like to invite you to sign up for my newletter on Substack as either a free or paid subscriber at https://beingfiain.substack.com/

When You Are Different, To Exist Is To Rebel was originally published in ArtfullyAutistic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been going through this thing lately.

Where nowhere feels like home.

Where no matter who is around me, I feel alone.

Where I wish desperately with every passing day that I could stop time in its tracks, if only to rest for a little while.

Where I feel utterly depleted from little failures... Failures like suddenly feeling completely incapable of going out for a walk with the dog, like wanting to see my friends but being unable to face the thought of pretending to be okay, like not having the energy to do my daily yoga or meditation practice that usually keeps me sane, and like becoming steadily exhausted by the insistant, nagging thought;

"What is the point?"

Depression crept up slowly after finally completing the four-year marathon of my bachelor’s degree. So slowly that I didn’t even notice something was wrong until I found myself suddenly devoid of all energy, blundering in the fading light I hadn’t noticed was dimming until it was all but extinguished, wondering how I got into this dark abyss and how I would ever find the strength to climb back out again.

I was supposed to feel happy, relieved, free, right? The idea of this triumphant moment had gotten me through countless late-night meltdowns while submitting a report one minute before the deadline, through seemingly endless lectures, field trips, practicals and pre-exam cram sessions, not to mention all the personal battles, or the real “stuff of life”, that has to fit somewhere into the middle of that…yet, I wasn’t happy. Instead, the wave of pent-up stress, old trauma and fear I had been holding back for all those years took that moment of my lowered defence to flood me at once.

This already overwhelming tide of despair was given weight by the heavy impression that there wasn’t even one person I could tell who could possibly understand my exasperation and grief at this unrecognisable person I was becoming, who I would feel comfortable burdening with my suffering on top of their own or, as my tired mind whispered to me in the dark; who would even be capable of helping me anyway.

Only I can do that...right? Except I didn’t even know how to take the first step.

When everything feels too big to overcome, scaling that looming mountain of "all the things I have left to do" suddenly seems impossible. How do I even begin when I am having trouble walking outside my front door, even as my legs are aching from sitting still? I want to do positive things for the world, I want to be a part of the solution that creates a better one, but instead, I just seem to be endlessly dragged down by the symptoms of the problem.

A Culture of Disconnection

One thing I am sure of is that it’s not just me, there is an epidemic of hopelessness taking hold that is the product of a very fragmented society. Some people may be more sensitive to this seam of pain that is running through us all but nevertheless most people will experience some shade of it at some point in their lives, with startling suddeness as all the lights flick out or, like me, in an almost imperceptible, steady ebbing of colour.

However, it is not us, the victims of this mass social alienation, that need to be "fixed". We are not the ones who are broken, we don’t necessarily just need medication and therapy (although they certainly have their place) before being unceremoniously cast back into an unforgiving and hostile world, what we desperately need at the core of our global culture is connection.

Don’t get me wrong, therapy can provide us with a connection to another human being that is both immensely powerful and often life-changing. It can be the lifeline we need to get back up when we’ve reached our breaking point. But I want more than a weekly dose of deep connection. I’m an advocate of the concept therapy at a bigger scale; all of us showing up for each other, all the time.

Because what we are missing is feeling like we matter, like our pain is valid, that we are allowed to fall apart, that there is space held for us in the familial, social and professional realms of our lives to be seen and heard...that the world is a safe place to simply show up as ourselves, exactly the way we are in each moment, and just be human together.

The thing is, all of this requires other people. And most of us, especially in the Western World, have been taught that needing others is weakness, that strength is found in independence which we define as “going it alone”.

We receive social praise and validation for isolating ourselves further and further from each other, building walls so high and with such focus on our goals of self-sufficiency and high achievement that we don’t realise until it’s too late that although others can’t scale or penetrate our barricades, we are equally unable to get out of these mighty fortresses we have painstakingly constructed.

From a young age, we are taught that we should compete, not connect. A mentality that (conveniently) is highly beneficial to the perpetuation of the deeply flawed, individualistic, consumerist and profit-driven model of capitalism.

This way of thinking has contributed to the creation of a damaging culture of disconnection which is encouraged by our society to a disturbing degree, even in the face of robust and mounting evidence that disconnection and loneliness are potentially as detrimental to the health of it’s citizens as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, that we are much more likely to die of a myriad of diseases, statistically closer to meeting our ends through heart disease, cancer, depression and suicide.

After all, like most primates, humans are highly social animals; we were never meant to function alone.

Yet, oftentimes, we were brought up in small, core family units (if we’re so lucky) in homes that are cut off by stone walls, physically and psychologically, from our neighbours living merely feet away. In many cases, estranged even from our larger network of relatives.

In a healthy society, we would be whole as a product of our strong familial and community bonds. We would be a part of a network of people that would function as a wider family, each member caring for and looking out for each other.

Not to say things would be perfect (they wouldn’t). We would still have trauma, grief and suffering to cope with, we would still have challenges to face. But in an unconditionally loving, supportive and understanding environment, our resilience to these events would be much, much higher.

Likewise, deep healing can only occur in an space of emotional safety, validation and acceptance because this is what defuses shame, perhaps the single greatest threat to connection.

Without the shame that comes inherent with disconnection, our capacity to deal with issues as they arise would increase exponentially, leaving little room for trauma to take root, fester and morph into addiction, sickness and disease.

The Danger of Virtual Connection
"Social" media has been presented as the modern solution - sold to us as a cyber hack of connection. Yet this is a connection that occurs only within the mental arena, while our physical selves remain alone in our living rooms, usually wishing we were somewhere else.

Of course, social media can be a wonderful and effective tool for sparking initial connections, broadening minds, spreading ideas and sharing stories that speak to others and make them feel temporarily less alone...but it has its limits.

The true work of meaningful connection is done in a shared spaces, where more than words are connecting us. Where the simple, brave act of showing up, the wholehearted gift of just being there, changes everything.

It takes us to a deeper level of connection, where the simple act of witnessing someone’s pain forges a space where true intimacy can occur....even if that means just touching an arm, holding a hand or sitting together saying nothing at all.

And yet, how have I reacted to this new awareness of my own experience of disconnection?

By googling the questions I’m too afraid to ask anyone in my life in a desperate search for answers, by scrolling through artwork and memes on Pinterest and Instagram that reflect my deepest thoughts, fears and agonies.

All just to feel for a brief time as if someone else out their feels the same way I do. That maybe I’m not just broken, maybe I’m not alone in this after all.

Breaking the Silence
Would it be easier for me to tell a person instead of a search engine how I’m really feeling? No. It would be much, much harder. I know that’s the case, otherwise we would all be telling each other how we feel all the time.

And it is easy to see why we hold back, there are certainly greater risks to bring open. Being vulnerable is always a risk...but that is exactly what makes it so brave.

To quote the wonderful researcher and storyteller Brené Brown; it is also what makes “vulnerability the birthplace of connection" because through the greatest risks come the greatest rewards (eventually...because the greatest things also take time, don’t they?) and what could possibly be a more more rewarding than feeling like your story matters to somebody? Than being seen, heard, and understood exactly as you are, where you are?

Because it’s becoming more and more clear to me, the more I have suffered in silence, that it is in precisely the opposite way that we find our home, a place of belonging and safety, in an otherwise scary and uncertain world.

It is found by reconnecting with our own inner voice, even if for now, it is only a cracked, hoarse whisper. Because by speaking up, even if it’s just to ourselves to start with, we validate our own feelings in the process, and by so doing, acknowledge the worthiness of our own story and the stories of others.

The very act of manifesting them into sound, bringing them into the physical world, is a relief. It makes them real, gives them substance and makes them worthy of being heard. By uttering the things we never dared to dream we would ever, could ever, speak aloud, we are undertaking the radical act of self-acceptance, in all our flaws, pain and darkness.

We are choosing the wild, untrodden path of loving ourselves without exception. And as an indirect result, we are also accepting the light and shade that also exists in everyone else around us.

That is how we open the way to a new kind of human family, a culture of acceptance, belonging and connection. That is how we walk the path by which we might finally find our way home to each other and to ourselves.

If there is one thing the darkness is teaching me, it is that taking those first steps down that unlit path is not easy, it is certainly the harder road, and at first it may feel just as terrifying and pointless as the lonely void you’ve left behind.

But if you keep walking on, despite the fear, despite the darkness, there is every chance that you will stumble across your courage, find your lost heart still beating and bump into other people who have chosen, just like you, to walk on that difficult terrain in search of something more.

It is in this way that you will look around one day and realize that you are no longer alone, that you are finally striding sure-footed, that you have learned to navigate by the stars.

Being Human in a Culture of Disconnection was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.