Do you trust your own feeling?

I have always been drawn to things I do not understand. I cannot really explain why. Perhaps the unknown is attractive enough by itself.

A question may seem pointless to someone else — something not worth knowing at all — but once it enters my mind and I still cannot understand it, I rarely leave it alone.

The exploration can begin anywhere. In a museum, I may see an unfamiliar object and first imagine what it is, why it looks that way, and how it might work. Then I learn what it actually is. The imagination, the wrong guesses and the real answer all stay with me, becoming material I can later use to understand something else.

It can also begin with a sentence, an advertisement, a sign, an unnoticed detail in a product, or something so ordinary that everyone has stopped noticing it. It may have been there for years. It may even have been noticed so often that it has become invisible.

Then one day, once enough of the surrounding world makes sense, I suddenly see it. It was never absent. I simply did not yet have the context required to understand it.

Language is linear. One sentence can only be followed by the next. My thinking does not feel that way.

When a question appears, my mind often expands in many directions at once. Possibilities, things I have seen before, apparently unrelated knowledge, other people's reactions and details in the environment quickly form a network.

Eventually, that network contracts again. Possibilities are compared, rejected and recombined until one answer remains the most reasonable under the information available at that moment. Then I try to verify it.

This can make explaining myself difficult. To compress something network-shaped into linear language, I have to decide where to begin, what comes first and what can wait. Sometimes the result is still more complicated than I intended.

I am learning to express myself more clearly. But I do not want to make my thinking simpler merely to make my expression simpler.

If I had to choose a metaphor, I like the idea of a “world model” from artificial intelligence.

I am rarely satisfied by an isolated answer. I want to know why something exists, what it is connected to, what would happen if one condition changed, and where it sits inside a larger system.

That is why I prefer to build from the smallest details. Once enough of the micro-level makes sense, the larger structure begins to become visible.

And when something cannot be understood, it feels like a bug in that model. One bug may not matter. But if too many pieces remain unexplained, I find it difficult to believe that I truly understand the system.

So I keep exploring.

A sentence, a pause, a tone of voice, an expression or a shift in body language can trigger thought almost instantly. I am not sure I always enjoy that involuntary process, but I have undoubtedly benefited from it.

I do not judge a person from one isolated detail. A single signal can support too many explanations. I need more information, a longer observation and a fuller environment.

So my impression of someone does not feel like a puzzle being assembled piece by piece. It is more like a blurred image gradually coming into focus.

Sometimes that process is surprisingly fast. Within seconds I may already have a strong feeling about someone. Sometimes I can anticipate how they are likely to react before they explain themselves. I also adjust the way I speak according to those reactions, so the same idea may be expressed very differently to different people.

I do not regard this as a mysterious ability. I would rather think that my conscious mind has not yet had time to narrate the reasons, while the information has already been integrated somewhere deeper.

So when a feeling appears, I often act. But afterwards, I still return to the same question:

What had I seen that made me feel that way?

Over the past few years, I have become more willing to remain myself.

The outside world keeps changing, and much of that change is beyond my control. But I can at least try not to surrender my way of thinking, my judgement, or what I genuinely believe simply because the environment changes.

I am also learning something I used to be much worse at: being a little kinder to myself.

I used to place other people first very easily. I still do not want to lose that part of myself, but I am beginning to understand that understanding other people does not require placing myself last.

Perhaps this is another form of trying to understand the world — except this time, the object is myself. And that is the most difficult part.

If I had to describe myself as something, I would probably choose a black hole.

I can keep observing the world outside me, building models, understanding people and looking for patterns. But when I turn the same attention inward, there always seems to be something at the centre that I cannot fully see.

I keep trying to understand it. Yet every time I seem to get closer, I discover that there is still more behind it.

Perhaps I will never completely finish doing that.