Who We Are by Hozier
"I wouldn’t say that I even try to be affirming in [my] work […] at times you can’t possibly offer affirmation or any sort of comfort. In a song like ‘Who We Are’, it’s about simply sitting in and accepting that this undeniable terror is part of life on Earth. We bear witness to this experience of life with all of the light and shade; not one thing is ever perfectly terrible or perfectly great" -Hozier
When I am wallowing in suffering, I look to simple things for comfort, in that understanding the world around me makes me feel safe, and my brain will break down whatever part of reality is necessary for me to think in black and white.
But the world does not exist in dichotomies, there are many paths to every goal, many actions behind every hand, many hurts behind every love, many lives behind every loss.
I hear "not one thing is ever perfectly terrible or perfectly great" and in an unexpected way, the nuance lies in everything being both, that's what's unspoken here, that human lives are both perfectly terrible and perfectly great.
I ride the bus and I work overtime and I harvest wild food and my phone service got cut off because I have to save the money for rent and I am a perpetual motion machine, love and ecstacy, grief and monotony. I am climbing out of a pit in my soul. I have found the salve to the rot in my chest and it is people, it is action, it is music, it is the "through" in the phrase "the only way out is through" it is a coworker buying me lunch, it is the screaming man, it is the lives I see etched into the bodies of strangers, it is the transition in the soft animal of me, from yearling to buck. It is the cataclysmic end and the buried seed, the tide of a human heart crashing against a steep cliff, raging to claw out a fingerhold in the sides.