I Against "against"

My mum used to say that I would only understand a mother’s mind once I had a child of my own. It wasn’t about being young or naïve—what I truly needed was mutual understanding. So I thought that if I physically went through enough, I might understand the world better. I believed I should travel widely to gain broader vision, or marry someone to gain wisdom I couldn’t acquire otherwise.

In some ways, I still agree with that idea. I can’t speak for things I haven’t experienced. But I’m not sure that’s a reason I must experience everything. No matter how passionate I am about intervening in the world, there are many things I simply cannot experience. I will never fully know what it feels like to live as a man, or how another group of people views the world. I don’t know what a boyfriend truly feels about his girlfriend. There’s a wall—a solid one—called “me”. These incomprehensible gaps come from “the other”, and I cannot fill them completely. No matter how hard I try, they remain entirely outside my world. I will never truly know how they felt. So, should I change my sex, get married, and adopt a new nationality just to understand them?

When I was younger, I believed that if I tried hard enough to explain my feelings, others would eventually understand me. If they didn’t, I thought it meant either they didn’t care enough, or I hadn’t tried hard enough. I assumed the gap in understanding came from a lack of desire to truly know someone.

This entire idea rests on the belief that if we speak thoroughly and experience everything completely, then complete understanding is possible. But is that really true? If I experience enough, explain enough, and want it enough, will everyone truly know one another? I have my doubts. Even when we try to communicate through shared codes—gestures, language, art, science, common emotional expressions, or even similar genetics—it still isn’t enough. These are just fragments of assumed meanings, partial agreements of what we might mean.

I believe all human social activity is essentially an attempt to share and receive precise thoughts and ideas. But spoken and written words fail to persuade entirely. As soon as words, texts, or sounds leave their original point, they begin to lose their essence. None of them are perfect.

These days, we speak often of equality—sexually, genetically. Some argue that we all deserve to be treated equally; others insist it is the goal humanity must achieve. Yet, in the very process of talking about equality, we end up fighting—against one another, over sex, genetics, or nationality. I think this is because we all use the same words in vastly different ways. There may be a “general” stream and a marginalised stream, but no one can definitively say which is the truly “good” one.

I am still young. Perhaps I haven’t experienced enough to comprehend any great truth. I’m not an idealist. I don’t believe there’s a perfect tool for building an ideal society. We are all trying in our own ways. Perhaps none of them are perfect. Or perhaps all of them are. I believe it’s because we are individuals. We might guess at what could make us feel okay, but we can never truly know what would make someone else happy. We can try to guess—but it’s always based on my standards, not theirs.

A simple answer or a tangled monologue—we are all different. We cannot fully understand the world, and there is no single solution for all of us. There are individual solutions for individual lives. And with that understanding—if there are only selves and not groups—then we need not oppose each other, but lean on one another. I hope I can live as myself, not dictated by experience or circumstance.

Or perhaps not.