On The Other Side of Consciousness

I used to think i was special. Afterall how could anyone possibly go through the exact same life as me? Have the same combination of fucked up parents, death, loneliness and estranged family as me? I was unique, my pain was unique, every single teardrop from my eye was unique.
But the more I looked around, the more I saw myself replicated in those around me. Mutated morphing visions of me in front of my own eyes. A fibonacci sequence of me repeating all over the universe.
I did not realize that most of our experiences are fairly common. Not the specificaties of them but our overall feelings are fairly 'relatable'. What hinders our ability to see this is our own prison of consciousness. We are locked in our feelings and perceptions, ever present and inescapable. There is an invisible barrier that seperates us from everyone, the wall of our own consciousness. We cannot help but see what see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel. That's just it isn't it?

Every attempt at empathy is just an effort to pierce the veil. Somehow break through, connect, feel. But we can’t. We can only imagine, simulate or relate something that we felt before. We can only pretend we feel what they feel. Everything we know is from our own experience, every emotion is weighed against our own reference frame.
It’s isolating to live with this realisation. To know that no matter how much I love someone I will never be able to comprehend any other reality but mine. And vice a versa. We are truly alone then, aren’t we? Trapped in our own mind?

But the best among us are those fighting to escape consciousness still. Who press their noses to the metaphorical glass enclosure of consciousness and peer out. Push their palms against the glass and say: I see you. I am trying to understand you.

I don’t know how to reconcile with this loneliness of being the only one with my thoughts. Of seeing myself in others but never knowing them, not really. Sometimes I wish I can peer in and just listen to their thoughts but I can’t.
In the end there is only language; the only tool that connect us. To decipher our thoughts and render them legible to other minds. It is our desperate attempt to say: can you see me? I am right here to our fellow minds.

But I am constantly confronted with the failure of language. Of what it isn’t. It is not my sensations, it is not my mood swings, not my anger, no my sorrow, not even my joy. So much of language is retrospect. You are reliving something, simplifying it. So much of it is just translation. It’s me forcing my emotions to find into the words that are available to me. So much of it just me speaking in somebody else’s words, in the hope’s that some ounce of emotion comes through. Language edits, omits, permits only so much. The rest is permanently out of reach, on the other side of consciousness.