The other morning I woke from a dream that was drenched in deception. It was one of those dreams that arrange arbitrary shards of unpleasant memories into an ugly mosaic masquerading as reality. For several long moments, my bleary, half-woken brain knew nothing else but to believe it. I found myself submersed in untruth. Convinced that there was nothing more to me than my selfishness, my fear and my failures.

The thing about a lie, is that it is very rarely pure deceit. It’s most often just truth poisoned.

I trace back through the truth, and try to find the source of the poison.

I am selfish. I’m human. Hardwired to protect myself, to please myself, at the expense of all others.

I am fearful. I’m human. With an innate desperation to avoid pain in all its forms and to cower when it comes.

I fail. I’m human. I can’t have perfect foresight. I make mistakes.

Those things are part of me.

I am human.

Those three words start to echo through my mind. I consider the truth of my humanness. I dip my finger into it, raise it to my lips and instantly taste the poison.

I had believed that my imperfect, broken parts were greater and carried more consequence, than my whole. That somehow my selfish tendencies were greater than any capacity I had for others. That my fear somehow towered over every effort I made to be brave. That my failures accounted for more than my success or my perseverance or my ability to rise up, dust off and start again.

Being human is a hard and complex business. Especially when you feel yourself splintered into pieces that don’t seem to ever make sense together. But there is not one of those fragments of humanity that is more important that the human they are contained within.

And though it hardly seems a cure-all, I find comfort in it. Comfort in realising I’m a human, not just one piece of a human. Comfort in knowing that there are messy, broken parts of me and they clink up against the pieces that long to be better and the parts that are better.

The truth is… we’re human.

Broken humans.
Redeemable humans.
Whole humans.