According to Britney Spears’s infamous 2008 “Circus”, it would be “the ones that entertain and the ones that observe.” But then “Stuck In Love” reveals that we are divided as “hopeless romantics and realists” while “Focus” throws everything off claiming we are “hammers and nails.”
I am a confused 18-year-old wondering whether I am a tone-deaf singer on the sidewalk, the senior eyeing the cute boy across from her, or if I am the heavy metal tool that my dad said he would use to hang a picture and never did. I like cats and dogs, tea and coffee, the Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. So what am I then? I pour cereal and then milk at breakfast; I say Caribbean both ways; I pronounce the “l” in salmon; I think a hotdog is a sandwich.
But while I am pretty nonchalant about these divides, I do think that there is a defining line in what distinguishes the two types: being dead or alive. Whether it be mentally—through the brain—or emotionally—through the heart, it does not matter. We think with our brain and we love with our heart, however, we feel with both. We are not divided by our interests or by our own opinions, but by what we are feeling.
Dear Brain:
You feel alive most days, kind of as though you are five-years-old again and building forts in the living room. You feel alive when you laugh and when you sing and dance in the streets. Whenever your little sister comes into your room to show you funny videos and you end up laying on the ground for hours laughing, those are the good times. Eating an entire tub of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie or traveling around that new part of Los Angeles that you had no idea existed—that is what it is like to live.
You are dead during bad days; those days where you are staring at the white ceilings of your bedroom; those days of just wanting to sleep and stay in bed. The long nights sitting at your desk, reading the same unit over and over again. Those days are tiring. When you are lying in bed and you can’t help but worry about tomorrow or what the future will be. You are mentally drained and you need a break.
Dear Heart:
You did not skip a beat—or else you would be dead—but you did feel something when you saw your first love; it is that warm thought of being in his arms. That moment you saw Cassidy and held her for the first time: you were a big sister and she would always be your little one. Whenever Nicholas or Cassidy would get hurt and you had to comfort them with ice cream and funny Youtube videos of dogs—those were the days where you knew this was the type of love that you could not bear to lose. The whispers of secrets and smiles that ended in fits of laughter and adventures with your best friend—that was when you knew you loved them.
Then there were the days where some of your “friends” left and you knew they were not going to come back. The nights of crying and afternoons of heartbreak where something so small reminded you of something so painful. Then there was the day grandma died and you could not take the heartbreak of looking at mom break down every hour. It hurt to see her hurt. And that is when you learned how to break. That day, you—my heart—died and did not want to come back to life. You wanted to stay in the dark cavities of yourself and you wanted to skip a beat.
There will always be the idea of having two types of people in the world—the tools and those that get knocked into place, the romantics and the realists, and the living and the dead. However, it is about feeling dead or alive because that showcases who we are and what we feel. While our brain thinks for us, our heart loves for us. In both though, we are able to feel alive and dead through different experiences and that is what differentiates people—our feelings.