Mostly They Don’t

I’m trying to explain something to a friend and it’s going badly.

“There’s this thing,” I say, “where you’re looking down and you see something small that makes you say ‘woa.’ Like an ant carrying something huge, you know? And then you tilt your head up a little - like the hand on a clock - and you see something bigger. A lake maybe. And the ‘woe’ gets bigger.”

I can hear myself. I sound confused. The friend is nodding but their eyes are already glazing over.

“And you keep tilting,” I continue, desperate now. “You keep lifting your head. Mountains. Earth from space. Galaxies. The ‘woe’ keeps getting bigger until you reach the biggest possible ‘woe.’ And just beyond that -”

I stop. They’re lost. I’ve lost them. And I’ve lost the thing itself - the precision of what I was trying to say has collapsed somewhere between my mind and my mouth.

Here’s what was actually in my head:

Picture yourself standing at the center of a great dial. Look down, and you catch the shimmer of tiny life - ants hauling impossible loads, the swirl of bacteria under a microscope, the intricacy of wings on a housefly. A whole world alive with astonishing design. You can’t help but whisper, wow.

Tilt your gaze higher. Lakes, rivers, sprawling cities. Human ingenuity mapped on a planetary scale. Again - wow.

Higher still - mountains like frozen waves, clouds stacked like cathedrals. The wow thickens in your chest. Holy shit.

With each tilt, the dial turns, the awe ratchets up.

Now you’re looking at Earth itself - a blue marble adrift in black, the way astronauts saw it for the first time. Holy fucking shit. The needle on the awe gauge is trembling.

But don’t stop. Keep dialing up. The solar system with its clockwork orbits. A star so big it makes our planet look like dust. Gas giants. Asteroids. Keep going. The Milky Way spilling across a moonless sky - every pinprick a sun with worlds of its own. Tilt farther. Clusters of galaxies, filaments of light stitched across unimaginable distances. Lean all the way back. As far as your head will go. See the universe - fifteen billion light-years wide. Power and beauty on a scale that swallows comprehension. The mystery devours you whole.

And just past the furthest edge your mind can reach - beyond the last horizon of everything you can imagine - that’s where I place God.

That’s what I was trying to say. That’s what existed whole and luminous in my head before I opened my mouth and watched it shatter into “woe” and “like the hand on a clock” and my friend’s polite confusion.

This happens to me all the time.

I know I’m a deep thinker. I have a rich imagination. I see things clearly - metaphors, frameworks, strange little architectures of meaning that feel precise and alive inside me. And then I try to give them to someone else and they evaporate. The thing I meant becomes something smaller, clumsier. Half of it disappears in translation.

It’s frustrating. And lonely.

Because no one else can see what I see. No one else lives inside my head. The dial, the vertical ascent from awe to cosmic dread to the edge where God lives - that exists perfectly in my mind. But the moment I try to transport it into yours, it degrades. Language flattens it. My sentences stumble. The scaffolding that holds the whole thing together collapses, and what reaches you is rubble.

I’m locked inside my head and you’re locked inside yours. We can’t bridge that. We gesture at each other through language and hope something survives the crossing, but mostly it doesn’t.

I could just stop talking. Keep it all locked inside where language can’t touch it. But the silence is worse than the garbling. So I keep trying.

And I use tools.

Writers have editors who catch what they meant. Musicians get producers who shape the raw sound. Using tools is not new.

AI is just the newest version of that.

When I use it, I’m not outsourcing the thinking. The dial thing, the way awe stacks until you hit God - that’s mine. AI doesn’t know what it’s like to be me. It didn’t live this. What it does is help me stop losing the thing between my head and the page.

But even with the tool, I’m still alone.

The sentences come out tighter. The structure surfaces. I lose less of the thing in translation. But no tool fixes the actual problem. You’re still locked out of my head. No one will ever see the dial the way I see it. They’ll get some version of it. An approximation. Never the thing itself.

So what’s the point?

I don’t know if trying to be understood is noble or stupid. What I know is I have this inner world that feels urgent and real. I can either keep it to myself or try to get some piece of it across, knowing it’ll degrade, knowing people will misunderstand.

I try anyway.

Not because I think I’ll succeed. I won’t. But because the silence is worse. And maybe someone will catch enough of it to say “I see what you mean,” and for a second, the distance between us doesn’t feel so fucking vast.

I keep using whatever tools get me closer. I keep stumbling through explanations that don’t quite work. I keep publishing these imperfect translations, knowing they’ll never carry the whole thing.

But the loneliness doesn’t actually shrink much. The tools help me say it better, but saying it better doesn’t mean anyone’s inside my head with me. They’re still out there. I’m still in here.

I’m trying to think clearly enough that someone can finally hear me, but mostly they don’t.