Where I Thought I Ended

We walk around assuming we stop at our skin.

It is such a basic assumption that it is hard to even see as one. There is a bag of skin, and inside it there is a self, and outside it there is everything else. The boundary is obvious. You can point to it.

Alan Watts spent a lot of his life arguing that this is a description of how we experience ourselves rather than a description of what is there. The skin is not a wall. It is a membrane in a continuous field, and treating it as the outer limit of a person produces a particular kind of loneliness that we then mistake for the human condition.

I found that idea interesting in the way you find an idea interesting when it has not cost you anything.

Then I was sitting in an interview about an hour in, and the man I was talking with started describing airports.

He travels for work. Long stretches away. And he told me that he used to think he needed someone waiting at the other end of every flight, and that he noticed it most sharply standing at a gate once, glancing at the phones of the people around him. Everybody typing some version of just landed. The easy replies coming right back.

And he had nobody to text.

So he would text his teenage son, who answers the way teenagers answer, which bothered him a little too, and did not make him love the kid any less.

I had landed that week. Alone, on a trip for this book. I had stood at a gate with my bag and done the exact same thing, looked at the exact same phones, and had the exact same small ugly thought, and then texted someone who took four hours to answer.

The rule when you are the one holding the recorder is that you do not say that. You keep your face doing its job. The moment you make it about you, the person across from you starts managing your feelings instead of telling you the truth, and the interview is effectively over.

So I did not say it. But something came down in that room that never went back up, and the rest of that conversation was different in a way I could feel and could not have engineered.

This keeps happening, and it has turned out to be the actual engine of the whole project.

I set out to document people whose lives do not look like mine. That was the premise. Different regions, different faiths, different politics, different relationships to danger and money and God. The idea was that the distance would be the interesting part.

The distance has been real. I am not going to pretend otherwise. A Pawnee straight dancer's life is not my life, and a man who spent time in prison has not lived my week, and it would be an insult to all of them to collapse that into we are all the same, which is the kind of sentence people say when they want the conversation to end.

But the specific details being different has almost nothing to do with what happens in the room.

What happens is that someone describes a very particular thing, an airport, a swimming pool they could not take their shirt off at, a truck they sat in for two hours after their father died, a cup of coffee they make so slowly it takes half the morning. And the particulars are entirely theirs. And underneath the particulars is something I recognize immediately and completely, and did not expect to.

I have started to think the boundary is not where I assumed it was. Not because we merge into some warm undifferentiated soup, which is not my experience of anything, but because the thing I thought was the private interior, the part behind the skin that nobody else has access to, turns out to be the part that is least unique.

The outside is where we differ. Where we live, what we wear, who we vote for, what we would never do. That is all real and it is all surface.

Which is exactly backwards from how we sort each other.

I do not have a clean landing for this. What I notice practically is that it is very hard to hold a category and a person at the same time. The category is a convenience that works right up until somebody in it tells you about an airport, and then it does not work anymore, and you cannot get it back.

That is inconvenient. Categories are efficient. I would get through my week faster with them intact.

I just cannot seem to keep them.

Resonance: The Quiet Revolution of Compassion is out November 10, 2026 from Akiiki Press.