Octopuses Have Three Hearts and So Did I Once

ice cream for breakfast, dead eyes by dusk

I miss six year old me. He had this absolute conviction that adults were basically just tall kids who had figured out the secret handshake to get into the grown-up club, and once I learned it, I'd still be fundamentally the same person, just with access to ice cream for breakfast and the ability to stay up past nine without staging a rebellion. Six year old me collected bottle caps like they were ancient coins, believed that if you dug deep enough in the backyard you'd eventually hit China (and maybe have tea with some very confused farmers), and was absolutely certain that fairness was a law of physics, as immutable as gravity. He thought good people won and bad people lost, that honesty was always the best policy, and that somewhere in the world there was a scoreboard keeping track of who deserved what. The little bastard was wrong about almost everything, but God, he was so beautifully, catastrophically wrong.

You know what's funny about mirrors? Not the obvious stuff about reflection and vanity and all that surface level symbolism that gets trotted out in every mediocre creative writing class, but the way they sometimes catch you off guard when you're walking past one in a dim hallway, and for just a split second you don't recognize the person staring back at you. It's like your brain takes a microsecond vacation from the job of maintaining your sense of self, and in that gap, that tiny fissure in consciousness, you meet yourself as a stranger. That's been happening to me more lately, except it's not just mirrors anymore, it's everything. The way I laugh at jokes that aren't funny, the way I find myself nodding along to conversations I fundamentally disagree with, the way I catch myself performing a version of myself that feels like watching someone else wear my clothes.

Six year old Dharmansh would've crossed the street to avoid this person, would've instinctively known that this adult was one of those grown ups who'd forgotten how to play, who'd traded imagination for anxiety and wonder for a resume that reads like a obituary written by someone who never really knew the deceased. That kid believed in magic so hard it was practically a religion, not the Disney kind with talking animals and happy endings, but the real magic that happens when you're lying on grass looking at clouds and suddenly understand that you're part of something infinite and beautiful and completely inexplicable. He believed that adults were just kids who'd gotten really good at pretending, that somewhere inside every boring person in a suit was someone who still remembered what it felt like to believe in dragons, and christ, was he wrong about that, was he wrong about everything, because here I am, having become exactly the kind of person who makes children instinctively quiet down when I enter a room, not because I'm scary but because I've got that dead eyed look that kids recognize as the absence of whatever it is that makes life worth living.

I used to have convictions that felt as solid as mountains, beliefs that I'd defend to the death, principles that seemed as immutable as gravity. Now I catch myself agreeing with people just to avoid conflict, nodding along to conversations I don't care about, existing in this weird space between who I was and who I'm becoming. The six year old me would be horrified by my capacity for compromise, not the healthy kind that comes with wisdom, but the soul destroying kind that comes with giving up. He believed in absolutes the way only children can – right and wrong, good and evil, chocolate and vanilla (though he was firmly team chocolate, naturally and rightfully). Somewhere along the way, I learned that the world exists in shades of gray, which sounds mature and sophisticated until you realize that gray is just another way to say you’ve given up on color.

I can give you a dozen reasons why that bastard six year old's worldview was naive and unrealistic, why believing in fairness and justice and the basic goodness of people is a luxury you can't afford once you've seen how the world actually works. But here's the thing that keeps me up at night, staring at the ceiling: what if he was right and I'm wrong? What if all my fancy understanding of human nature and social dynamics and the way power really works is just an elaborate justification for having given up on the things that actually matter? What if cynicism isn't wisdom but just another kind of stupidity, the kind that mistakes exhaustion for enlightenment?

I think about Icarus a lot these days now not because I flew too close to the sun, but because I never left the ground. I built my wings and then convinced myself that flying was dangerous, that the smart money was on staying terrestrial, that anyone who actually tried to soar was probably compensating for something. Six year old me would have built those wings and jumped off the first tall building he could find, not because he was suicidal but because he believed in the possibility of flight. Current me would have analyzed the aerodynamics, calculated the probability of success, and decided it wasn't worth the risk but jumped anyway hoping for the wings to fail. Current me would have sold the wings and bought a sensible car.

It started small, the way these things always do. Maybe it was agreeing to interact with people I didn't particularly like, or laughing at their stories about weekend plans that sounded like elaborate forms of self torture disguised as fun (ew yoga). Or maybe it was earlier, when I first noticed I was curating my thoughts before I spoke them, not just for politeness but for some invisible audience that had somehow taken up residence in my head. You know how stand up comedians talk about getting their first laugh and suddenly realizing they're performing for the room instead of just talking? That's what normal conversation started feeling like, except I couldn't remember when I'd stopped being genuine and started being funny, when I'd traded anatomy for applause.

The weird part is how good I've gotten at it. I can slip into the right version of myself for any situation now, the professional me who uses phrases like "circle back" and "ideate" and other fancy corporate circlejerk language without irony, the social me who remembers to ask follow up questions and hit them with the socially acceptable laugh at the right moments, the family me who pretends to care about distant relatives' grandchildren and nods knowingly when someone mentions relatives I've never heard of.

There's this moment in every superhero origin story where the hero realizes they have powers, right? Except nobody talks about the reverse origin story, where you realize you've lost whatever made you special in the first place. I used to write stories about dragons and believe they mattered, used to stay up late reading by flashlight under my blanket because books felt like doorways to somewhere better, somewhere more real than real. Now I scroll through social media at 3 AM, watching other people live lives that look like the one I thought I'd have, and I can't remember the last time I felt that electric thrill of discovering something new, something that made me want to grab the nearest person and say "did you know that octopus have three hearts?" The child I was collected moments like that, hoarded them like a dragon hoards gold, and I think that's what I've lost, not just the capacity for wonder, but the belief that wonder matters. It's like learning that the Wizard of Oz is just a guy behind a curtain, except instead of being disappointed, you decide to become the guy behind the curtain, pulling levers and speaking in a booming voice, hoping nobody notices that you're just as lost as everyone else.

The scary part isn't that I'm changing; everyone changes, that's just basic human development and adaptation and all that. The scary part is that I'm not sure I'm changing into anything in particular. It's like being a method actor who's been in character so long they've forgotten they're acting. I find myself wondering if this is what growing up really means, not becoming who you're supposed to be, but becoming so good at being whoever you need to be that you forget there was ever a choice involved.

I was watching this old interview with Robin Williams once, and he was talking about how comedy was his way of dealing with the darkness, how being funny was both a defense mechanism and a form of truth telling. But you could see it in his eyes sometimes, this flicker of exhaustion, like he was tired of being the guy who made everyone else feel better. And I thought about how many of us do that in smaller ways – become the person who makes things easier for everyone else, who smooths over awkward moments and keeps conversations flowing and makes sure everyone feels included. It's not a bad thing, exactly, but it's also not nothing.

The thing about masks is that they're supposed to come off eventually. Halloween ends, the play finishes, the party's over and you go home and wash off the makeup and return to being yourself. But what happens when the mask becomes so comfortable that taking it off feels like the performance? When being genuine starts to feel like putting on an act because you've been performing normalcy for so long that actual spontaneity feels forced and artificial?

I keep thinking about water, how it takes the shape of whatever container it's in. Pour it into a square glass and it becomes square, pour it into a round bowl and it becomes round. Water doesn't have an identity crisis about this, it's just water being water, adapting to its environment. But I'm not water. I'm supposed to have a shape of my own, some kind of essential structure that remains constant even as I adapt to different situations. Except I'm starting to suspect that maybe I've been liquid all along, and what I thought was my shape was just whatever container I happened to be in at the time.

The irony is that writing about this makes me feel more like myself than I have in months. Not because I'm revealing some deep truth or having a breakthrough, but because I'm finally having a conversation with myself instead of performing for an imaginary audience. It's like the difference between singing in the shower and singing karaoke where same voice, same songs, but one is for you and one is for everyone else.

I think about how artists sometimes talk about their work like it comes from somewhere else, like they're channeling something rather than creating it. And I wonder if that's what I'm missing – not a sense of self, but a sense of source. Like maybe the problem isn't that I don't know who I am, but that I've forgotten how to listen to whatever it is that makes me me.

The funny thing is, I'm not even sure I want to go back to whoever I was before. Maybe that person was just as constructed, just as much of a performance, but one I was less aware of. Maybe growing up means accepting that you're always going to be a work in progress, always going to be figuring out who you are in relation to where you are and who you're with. Maybe the self isn't something you find or lose but something you create and recreate.

But still, there's something to be said for knowing your own voice, even if it changes over time. For being able to distinguish between the thoughts that feel like yours and the ones that feel like they belong to someone else. For trusting your own instincts even when they don't align with what everyone else thinks you should do. It's not about being selfish or inflexible, it's about having something solid to stand on when everything else is shifting around you.

The strangest part of this whole dissolution is how it's made me nostalgic for pain, for the time when I could feel things with the intensity of a tuning fork. I miss being heartbroken over things that seemed monumentally important at the time, miss the way anger felt like fire in my chest when I witnessed unfairness, miss the way joy could hit me like a physical force and make me laugh until my sides hurt. Now I experience emotions like they're happening to someone else, like I'm reading about them in a book written by someone who remembers what it was like to feel alive. There's something deeply fucked up about mourning your own capacity for feeling, about recognizing that you've become the kind of person who says things like "it is what it is" and "that's just how the world works", phrases that would have made six year old Dharmansh want to stage a revolution. He believed in changing the world, in fighting dragons, in the power of stories to transform reality. I've learned to accept reality as it is, to work within systems I hate, to make peace with compromises that feel like small deaths. And maybe that's wisdom, maybe that's maturity, maybe that's just what growing up means, learning to live with the gap between who you thought you'd be and who you actually are. But wisdom tastes like defeat sometimes, and maturity feels suspiciously like giving up, and I can't shake the feeling that I've traded something essential for something merely functional. The child I was wouldn't recognize the adult I've become, and more importantly, he wouldn't want to. He'd see through all the rationalizations and explanations and justifications to the simple truth underneath: that I've become exactly the kind of person we used to make fun of, the kind who's forgotten how to see magic in the world.

I read somewhere that the brain doesn't fully develop until you're twenty five, which means that for the first quarter of your life, you're essentially a work in progress, a rough draft of a person who might never get properly edited. This should be comforting, but instead it feels like a cruel joke because by the time you're old enough to know who you really are, you've already made most of the decisions that determine who you're going to be. The six year old me was making promises he couldn't keep to a future he couldn't imagine, swearing he'd never become the kind of person who forgot to call his friends or who stopped reading books for fun or who let weeks go by without talking to his best friend. He was so sure of his own goodness, so confident in his ability to remain unchanged by the world's inevitable corruptions. Now I wonder if growing up is just the process of becoming someone your younger self wouldn't recognize, if maturity is just another word for giving up on the person you used to be.

Six year old me is still somewhere. I think about that kid a lot, barefoot on warm tiles, pressing his ear to the walls, convinced the house had a heartbeat. He cried when ants got stepped on. He talked to every stray dog he met like it was an old friend. He thought clouds followed him, and that grown ups forgot how to fly because they stopped believing they could. He used to close his eyes at night and ask the stars to keep watch, like they owed him something for how faithfully he loved them. That kid had a name for every animal in the neighbourhood. He thought kindness was a kind of superpower. He thought stories could save people. He thought he could save people. And maybe that’s the hardest part. Not that I became someone else. But that he’s still inside me, knocking on the walls, asking if I remember how to play. If I remember how to believe in things without proof. If I remember how to feel wonder without irony. I keep pretending I can’t hear him. That I’ve got work to do. Calls to take. Things to study. Grown up things. But the truth is, some nights, when it’s late and the world gets quiet enough, I do hear him. And he’s still waiting. Still patient. Still hoping I’ll answer.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I met six year old me again. If he just showed up one day and rang the doorbell, dirt on his knees, mismatched socks, pockets filled with dry fruit, shit eating grin. Would he recognize me? Would he ask where all the bottle caps went? Would he want to know if we ever made it to China, or if we still believe in dragons, or if we've finally had ice cream for breakfast without asking? I think he’d talk a lot at first, about clouds, and the way grass feels on bare feet, and how he’s almost positive that time travel is real if you spin fast enough. He'd probably ask if we're a superhero yet or a multi squillionaire after selling all of the cool rocks we saved. And I don't know what I’d say. Maybe I’d just listen. Let him talk. Let the sound of his certainty remind me of something I forgot somewhere along the way. I think I’d sit beside him on the dusty ground, knees pulled to chest, and I’d let the silence stretch long enough to remember what it felt like to believe the world was still becoming, and so were we. And maybe, just maybe I’d ask him for a favor. Not advice. Not forgiveness. Just... if he could stay a little longer. Because even if I can't go back to being him, I think I still need to know he's in there. Somewhere. Waiting. Watching. Still hoping.

<3