NIKKI BYRD — writer, thinker, lover

It comes from nowhere. I find it to be quite a nuisance, and I cannot even unearth its origins. No matter how much I sift through the files of my life, I cannot pinpoint the year, the people involved, or if or when I wake up like this.

The oddities of life are sometimes from our subconscious manifestations. Even when something as simple as creating an Instagram profile and labeling yourself a SCIENTIST for fun comes to fruition after a very subtle and, I dare say, playful gesture, it is alarming; that archetype comes to fit you, choose you. It’s a frightful and exhausting fate to be a scientist, and to be one, you need not be decreed by any institution except the one of your own mind. And when I became a scientist, I don’t know, for to be a scientist one owns a madness, but to my benefit, a justified one. There’s always a means to an end in that sense because it’s all been in the name of science!

I cannot tell you where it began, but I can tell you what I study. It’s humans! Myself included, although that label is sometimes suggestive based on my proclivity to ruminate, which often trails in madness’ shadow. Humans are the most fascinating creatures. When I go into my own mind it’s always a surprise, and I always like to see the surprises of others.

The observation of the subject begins immediately, of course, unless I have a dossier of sorts. Otherwise, I think it important to have a first impression upon meeting – that’s raw data. Congruencies and proportions then come into play. And really, it’s not all about the mathematics of science because then it’s not really fun and all. It’s about reactionary emotions, impulses, and appeal; I think it’s not all stochastic. What about me attracts me, propels me to you, repels me from you, — friend, foe, lover? Then, we get into personality profiles, tics, childhood, parental figures, beliefs, mental patterns, stimuli. However, if the subject is banal, I find providing myself as a stimulant in most cases is beneficial unless I’m part of blind experimentation. You have to get them thinking. Still, I firmly believe that everyone should study others and themselves too. For me, it’s just the fun of it all. I relish when I am right and am pleased when I’m wrong. About someone, I mean. Humans and their actions can be very surprising, and every action has deep-seated roots in someone’s brain.

For example, I am from New Orleans, although I was raised in the suburbs most of my life. Anyone from New Orleans or who has visited has heard the deep southern drawl influenced by our history. My parents have a very minor accent, and I tend not to have one at all. However, one day I proved myself wrong. At the age of eighteen, I was so furious with my boyfriend at the time that my voice, usually unaccented, became thick with New Orleans brogue I’d never heard come out of my mouth. You’d think I’d been possessed by my ancestors the way I was speaking! It was almost like summoning another language. In retrospect, I realize that our roots can never escape us, even under the guise of social conditioning. We are who we are underneath it all, and the odd thing in my studies is that I’ve come to a final conclusion: everyone is the same.

How can I make this conclusion? From a very fundamental standpoint, we are all animals and operate, as humans, on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. 

How we obtain our resources may differ, but the impulse is all the same. We may incorporate a margin of error for anomalies, for the human race is eternally flawed but, overall, predictable and elementary.

However, although we are just dust in this universe, we’ve really found a way to jazz it up. We are thee dust. Humans, as primal as we are, can be really creative as we must for survival. That’s what interests me the most. I like to see how people dress their avatars; I like to see how people wear expressions and what emotions match them. I like to see the subtle raise of an eyebrow, a temple strain, a face tic; I like to see a fidget. I like the power of eyes, and I want to see how people use them. My favorite is posture. I love posture! These minute details of human expression all contribute to survival, social survival. All this experimentation, all these analytics, and it’s amazing how I still know absolutely nothing at all.

There are mysteries to humanity and life that are bigger than we can ever imagine. Love, a true and binding force, is mysterious. Don’t get me wrong – it’s mental, emotional, physical. Yes, it’s everything, and yes, there’s a scientific explanation to it all. But it’s not about how someone makes you feel; it’s about how you make them want to feel. Love is absent of selfishness, and suddenly you look in the mirror, and you see a stranger doing things for love they’d never, ever thought they’d do.

That mysterious force! What a motherfucker. Please understand — I’m not referring to lust, seduction, or compulsion. I’m talking about love as you know it. And when you hear that word, you see faces, and I’ve wondered all my life how I’ve come to love those faces. I have no obligation to love anyone, yet here I am. I love with no limits, and as everything around me is a mere observation of cause and effect, love is the only thing that just is.

I like that. It’s something I can’t figure out. I’ve dived into the schisms of the Google search engine to find the answers, but it’s just not that simple. And what a gift that’s been bestowed upon us from God. Even as a scientist, you might ask, “How is it that you can believe all of this superstition and mysticism?” Oh, but that’s the best part of being human. Being so predictable to the human eye but having a rich inner life of clear contradictions, having thoughts that are only sensible to you. 

Johannes Kepler developed laws of planetary motion, one being the force of gravity kept planets spinning in ellipses around the sun, and Isaac Newton then observed that planets in space were influenced by the huge mass of the other planets. I guess you can say that these large bodies were affected by other large bodies, often moving in unison or rhythm, that are in close proximity (as in a close few million lightyears) and not just singularities existing next to each other in a vacuum. The nature of humanity is the same. Humans, proportionate in size and physiological makeup, are affected by those nearby, maybe even by gravitational and electromagnetic standards. See sociophysics, psychophysics. Maybe Mercury, the planet with a front-row seat of Earth’s local star, has less in common with Pluto, which is furthest from the sun. But Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth, are predominantly composed of rock and metal, known as terrestrial planets. Mars is nascent even, and humans will likely terraform it.

While we may seem so different, we are all influenced by our environment and the people closest to us. This is nearly law, an absolute, dogma. We are more predictable than the planets in the universe, but even one day, they won’t be so arcane.

All I’m saying is this. Thank you for continually allowing me to wrap my mind around your nature, humans. You keep me busy most days, sometimes even perplexed, like a puzzle with a missing piece. Life is never old, life is never boring. You genuinely give this scientist meaning.