The Heartbreak of Humanity

A Reflection Piece.

When I returned from my near-death experience (NDE), the world felt both achingly familiar and completely foreign. My physical surroundings were the same. People were still there. Words like “love,” “friendship,” and “support” were still spoken. And yet, something had shifted so fundamentally that I found myself hovering in a kind of liminal space—present, but not fully belonging.

One of the first and most striking changes I noticed was my sense of positioning in relation to others. I felt both deeply connected and profoundly outside of things. It was as though I was walking beside humanity, but not quite within it. I could feel people’s energy more clearly than ever—feel their sadness, fear, longings, and unspoken truths—but at the same time, I no longer felt I was speaking the same emotional language. I had returned knowing what real love feels like. Not love as it’s often portrayed—transactional, conditional, or romanticised—but true, unconditional, expansive love. Love that sees without needing to fix. Love that holds without possessing. Love that is.

And what I discovered upon returning was that this love, though often referenced, was rarely lived.

Living Among Shadows

Since my NDE, heartbreak has become a daily companion. It’s not a dramatic or theatrical sorrow—it’s quieter than that. It’s the ache of watching someone you care about deny their own light. It’s the grief of watching disconnection dressed up as independence. It’s the sorrow of sensing the fog of human sadness drift into my energy field, uninvited but deeply felt.

I feel the heartbreak in small, subtle moments—conversations that skirt around what really matters, eyes that refuse to meet, words spoken with hollow cheer. I feel it when people offer support they do not follow through on. I feel it when kindness is withheld, when power is used to dominate, when fear masquerades as authority. I feel it when someone promises they’ll be there—and then forgets that they even offered.

And I feel it most acutely when I witness the inability of people to truly see one another. The blindness to vulnerability. The avoidance of intimacy. The way we rush past each other, unaware or unwilling to acknowledge one another’s tenderness.

A Dream That Said It All

Not long after my NDE, I had a dream that encapsulated this new reality.

In the dream, I was walking naked from a busy train station during peak hour—utterly exposed, vulnerable, and visible. People streamed past me, brushing by, eyes forward. No one stopped. No one asked if I was okay. Even someone I had once admired—a person I thought would see me—noticed me, nodded briefly, and kept walking. They were too consumed by the rhythm of their own life to stop.

When I woke, I felt the weight of that dream settle into my body. It wasn’t just a metaphor—it was a message. This is what it means to return after touching the eternal. You are now walking through a world where your nakedness—your truth, your light, your difference—is not always welcomed, acknowledged, or even seen.

It is not that people are cruel. It is that they are conditioned. Conditioned to move, to manage, to perform, to survive. And so they miss the soul standing bare before them.

What Do I Do With This Heartbreak?

I sob. Often. And not out of despair, but out of presence. Because the heartbreak is real, and to deny it would be to dishonour the sacredness of the love I touched.

Trying to express this heartbreak in words can feel overwhelming. The vocabulary doesn’t always stretch wide enough. Sometimes when I try to speak of it, I see the other person’s discomfort surface. They shift in their seat. They offer a solution. Or they fall silent. The weight of my sorrow becomes too much to hold.

And so, most days, I hold it alone. I don’t mean that with bitterness—I have made peace with the solitude. But it is not always easy. There are questions that echo in that space:

• How do I love those who are breaking my heart?

• Where do I stand in relation to the suffering I see?

• Do I love from afar?

• Is it my responsibility to intervene, to help, to change anything?

A World Full of Contradictions

What makes this heartbreak so complex is that it lives alongside profound beauty. I can be crying from the ache of human disconnection one moment, and the next moment, be pierced by an act of pure, quiet kindness. And that kindness changes everything.

A stranger’s warm smile.
A friend sending a David Bowie video to lighten my day.
Someone asking, “How can I make this space feel safer for you?”

The effort someone goes to weekly, to ensure that I will have a space to process my NDE.

Home-made cookies given to me, unexpectedly.
An invitation to “be as weird as you like”—spoken with sincerity, not sarcasm.

These tiny gestures feel like light piercings through the cracks of the collective heart. They are not solutions. They are not fixes. But they are reminders. They remind me that underneath it all, there is still love here. It may be buried beneath fear and habit, but it is still present.

And that presence is enough to keep me going.

I Cannot Be Your Light—But I Can Witness

Part of my heartbreak stems from the helplessness I feel. I cannot “fix” humanity. I cannot awaken people before they are ready. I cannot infuse them with the love I now know to be real. And when I try—when I overextend or over-share—I often find myself depleted, dismissed, or misunderstood.

So instead, I have learned to witness.

I witness the pain without trying to erase it.
I witness the confusion without trying to clarify it.
I witness the darkness without needing to turn on the light.

I sit in the cracks. I sit in the in-between. I wait.

Not with passivity, but with presence.

Because sometimes the most loving thing we can do is not look away. And that is the power I still hold, even when I feel powerless.

Embracing the Light in the Cracks

There is a phrase that comes to me often: stand in the cracks where the light gets through. It’s not a place of certainty. It’s not a place of comfort. But it is real. And in its honesty, it is sacred.

I no longer try to explain away the heartbreak. I no longer try to transcend it. I simply honour it. Because to feel this sorrow is to feel the depth of what love could be—and sometimes still is.

These cracks—the places where humanity breaks open—are also the places where transformation begins. Not through force, but through presence. Not through argument, but through example. Not through preaching, but through holding.

And in those moments—those flickers of connection, of kindness, of being truly seen—I believe we are all reminded of what is possible.

A Life Lived in the In-Between

Living post-NDE means living in paradox. I know what it is to feel one with everything, and I also know what it is to feel completely alone. I know the peace of divine connection, and I know the ache of earthly detachment. I know the expansiveness of the soul and the smallness of the egoic world.

This is the space I now inhabit: the in-between.
The not-quite-here, not-quite-there.
The bridge between love remembered and love forgotten.

And it is in this in-between that I’ve come to understand something quietly revolutionary:

I don’t have to be understood to be real.
I don’t have to be seen by everyone to remain in my truth.
I don’t have to fix the world to still love it fiercely.

Final Thoughts: Loving From the Cracks

So where does this leave me?

It leaves me loving from the cracks—with open eyes, a trembling heart, and a soul that remembers. It leaves me grieving what has been lost, honouring what is still here, and holding space for what might one day emerge.

To anyone reading who has also returned—who walks the world as a stranger in a familiar land—I want you to know:

Your heartbreak is not a weakness.
It is a compass.
It is a signal of what your soul longs for.
And it is proof that you have experienced loved so profoundly, you can no longer accept anything less than truth.

You are not alone.

And in the quiet moments—when someone meets your eyes with kindness, when a friend sends something that speaks to your soul, when you are told, “be as weird as you like”—know that these are the sparks that keep the human heart alive.

We are not here to fix it all. But we are here to love in the way we now know how to love.

Let that be enough.