Sometimes Some Things Are Better Left Unknown

this writing serves as a reminder for everybody, including me.

The Emotional Centre of Shinjuku Station by Hiro (1962)
i. I used to think that birds were okay with singing all morning. But no, they were not. Maybe, all these years they have been waiting for somebody to sing them back. Just maybe, birds sing not because they want to, but because there is nobody around them that sings, in the first place. There is nothing to fill the room around them.
That oftentimes,

they drown while trying to get people out of the water.

Sometimes, they forgot they have hands to sweep the water out of their way, safely arriving at the shore. They only have their eyes on their raising hands. And other times, they forget to learn how to swim. The irony is that the ones who help the most are often the ones who need the most help. They readily jump into the deep water whenever they feel like somebody needs saving. They know that drowning is not exactly a good feeling. They know that there are creatures lurking, looking for prey in the dark, moody water. They know, but they don’t want them to know.
ii. Sometimes,some things are better left unknown, they think. But this is where I found them facing the wrong side of the wall. This is where I found us wrong. A lot of times, we do not know where we should put our hands or why we even have to put our hands on other people. This is what I do not want to see. When we help them, we do not think about how they can grow out of their problems. Instead, we only think about ourselves. We help people not because we think they actually need help, but because we are afraid. We are afraid of all the things that have burned us into ash, and when we find them somewhere within others, we just want to kill them out of hatred.
We just do not want to see the things that have burned us.
When we help people, we think we are putting the fire out of their burned house. We think we are turning the fire away from consuming them. The same fire that consumed ours in the past. But no, we are not. We have to understand that they are not us, and we are not them. Don’t mistake their eyes for yours. Their hands for yours. They are not us.
iii. When I said that this is where I found us wrong, I meant it. Don’t help people thinking that they are us.

Don’t help people without actually thinking about them.

Because the worst thing you can do is not that you don’t help them; it’s thinking that you are helping them, but really, you are only trying to save yourself. You are just thinking about yourself, how you are afraid of the bad things, how you think that they are yourself — in the past. That you made an image of yourself inside of them, projecting your fears and traumas onto them. Tell people to act on them as if it’s yourself in the past. You are just trying to save yourself while hiding behind the idea that you are saving them. And this will do us more harm than good. Never save people when you just want to save yourself. Because it will never happen; it’s just an illusion that you made for yourself. Maybe, somehow, you could have saved yourself in the past through saving them.
When I said that this is where I found us wrong, I meant it. They are not you, and you are not them. Stop putting yourself in a place where it doesn’t belong. Stop belittling people into mere victims. They are not; we are not.
iv. This is why I always say;

help yourself first before you help people,

it’s not about how you are not allowed to help people; it’s that you don’t know how, even if you think you know how. There are way too many things to learn; never claim that we know how to tie their shoelaces when we can’t even do our own. Lying to ourselves won’t help.
This is why I always say;

help yourself first before you help people,

because when you’ve never helped yourself before, you won’t know the extent of how far you should go out of your way for them. You will be sucked dry, not knowing why you are losing some part of yourself because people say that helping people will help you too. Yes, but only to reach the first kilometer of the marathon, sweetheart. You need to figure it out yourself for the rest of the run.
So, please, please, darling, you have done good enough to stay here for years, swimming against the tides. I know you just want to reach the shore safely.
And please,
for this once in your whole life,
tell yourself to pull your head out of the water.
While you spent your whole life drowning, you forgot that there is space for you to breathe.