"I am large, I contain multitudes."

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

Self-will often wants consistency—a stable, coherent self that knows what it thinks, feels, and wants. When we contradict ourselves, hold two feelings at once, or find that we are not who we thought we were in a given moment, it can feel like a problem to be resolved.

Whitman seems unbothered by this. The largeness he describes is not arrogance—it is spaciousness. Room for the grieving self and the glad self. The certain self and the lost one. The one who has it together and the one who quietly doesn't. What if the contradictions are not evidence of something broken, but simply evidence of being fully human—too alive to fit neatly into any single story about who we are?