How you move through the world
A stride, a gesture, the tilt of your head;
Some people enter a room like a storm; others radiate calm. Their “frequency” alters the space around them.
Do you rush? Linger? Dance while cooking? Your cadence reveals inner worlds.
The words you choose
Favorite phrases, slang, or even silences—words betray your history, humor, and heart.
How you frame experiences—a scientist might describe love as chemistry; a poet, as a wildfire. The specific vocabulary, phrases, and metaphors someone gravitates toward creates a verbal fingerprint. I’ve noticed how certain people have signature expressions or ways of framing ideas that immediately identify them, even in writing
How you treat others
The small kindnesses or thoughtlessness, who we make time for, how we respond to vulnerability or need – these interactions form patterns that define us. Some people consistently elevate others, while some drain energy from every room.
Your memory
It’s not just what we remember, but how we remember, what we forget, and how those memories reshape us over time. As Oliver Sacks said “Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds. […] It is a form of storytelling that goes on in the mind and never stops. […] Our memories are, in the end, a shifting, vanishing, mutating thing, a mirage of unreliable glimpses.” We don’t just have memories; we curate them, unconsciously editing our past to make sense of our present.
Your contradictions
Some people manage to be elegant yet unsettling, cool yet chaotic, polished but always a little off.
Each of us is an entire society, a whole neighborhood of Mystery; it is fitting that we at least make the life of this neighborhood elegant and distinguished, that in the celebrations of our sensations there be refinement and decorum, and that, because it is sober, there be courtesy in the banquets of our thoughts.
The Only Me
By Pat Mora
Spinning through space for eons,
our earth—oceans, rivers, mountains,
glaciers, tigers, parrots, redwoods—
evolving wonders.
And our vast array, generations
of humans—all shapes, colors, languages.
Can I be the only me?
Our earth: so much beauty, hate,
goodness, greed.
“Study. Cool the climate,” advises my teacher.
“Grow peace.”
Can I be the only me,
become all my unique complexity?
Stories from A Closet of Errors 