Life Is an Ambigram

Lately, I feel like I’ve lost all my creativity to write. It has been weeks since I last wrote about anything in particular. Most of the days I feel like I am trapped in an endless loop of existence. Half of my day is spent in college and the other half in exhaustion. And somehow, I am still trying to crawl through the horrible tunnel that I thought I had finally escaped—exams. But in the midst of all the chaos that’s happening in my life, I found another reason that made my curious little mind happy again. Ambigrams.

Since my Instagram algorithm had been feeding me things that only aggravated my worries, I decided to escape to Youtube for a while. I had subscribed to several interesting channels that feed my curiosity. Be it about general knowledge, random facts, historical events, psychological concepts, horror stories, and even my favourite topic; penguins. So while scrolling through videos, I came across a video by ‘Vsauce’ (btw, it’s a crazy channel you must definitely check it out) where he talked about ambigram. That was the first time I discovered that something like this even existed (I like to believe that I am curious about many things, but I am also a lazy puppy, so let’s not question how I didn’t know about this before). Learning about that was enough to make my day. And like an excited kid who just discovered a cool trick, I immediately showed the video to my dad. 

“What a lovely little thing to make my day,” I thought. 

An ambigram is basically a typographic design where a word can be read in more than one way. Sometimes when the word is turned upside down it still reads as the same word, or sometimes it even transforms into another word entirely. 

For example, if you turn the word, let’s say, ‘Candy’ upside down, it will be read as the same word. 

Interestingly, the word ‘ambigram’ itself is an ambigram (crazy). 

That’s just the beginning. The fun part about ambigrams can also be seen in the works of Peter Newell, an American illustrator and cartoonist. His famous book, “Topsys & Turvys” which was published in 1893 contains many such illustrations that completely change the word when you flip the page upside down. 

Just flip the page upside down and wow! 

The term ambigram itself was coined much later by Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist fascinated by patterns, perception, and self-reference. He introduced this term in the 1980s while discussing wordplay and visual perception. He is famous for writing the book, “Gödel, Escher, Bach” where he explores the deep connections between patterns, art, mathematics, music, and cognition for which he even won the Pulitzer Prize. These ideas are very closely related to the concept of ambigrams. 

Later, the artist who popularised ambigrams as an art form was John Langdon. He was an American graphic designer, painter, and author. His designs became widely known after appearing in Dan Brown’s novel “Angels & Demons” which brought ambigrams into the mainstream culture. 

Just flip the page upside down and wow! 

But do you know where the real magic of ambigrams lies?

It lies in the idea of perspective. 

An ambigram can visually show how the same word can exist in two completely different orientations and still hold meaning. The letters themselves don’t change but the way we look at them does. This simple idea says a lot about life. It teaches us how to look at things differently.  

Let me apply this idea to myself. When I said, my days feel chaotic, did I look at them from any perspective other than misery? Well, no. But did I try? Absolutely yes! 

Even within the chaos I try to find little things to appreciate the life I am living. 

I didn’t study today, but I went to college. I didn’t complete my habit of reading 20 pages daily, but I read three. I didn’t write something creative for weeks, but I laughed with my friends, talked openly about my insecurities, and allowed myself to enjoy moments of doing absolutely nothing. 

We often live our lives on autopilot mode and rush from one responsibility to another. We analyse patterns in our relationships, search for explanations behind every emotion, and identify the ‘why’ so desperately that we forget to look at things from the brighter side. Why did this happen? Why did that person behave this way? Why didn’t things go the way we expected?

Sometimes, the meaning changes not because the situation changes, but because our perspective does. 

It is okay if you made a mistake today. It might look like growth tomorrow. No two people experience the same moment in exactly the same way. What feels embarrassing today might become one of the happiest memories you made by just being ‘you’ years later. What seems like a failure today might become the reason you find a better path tomorrow. 

Life, much like an ambigram, holds more than one interpretation. And it is okay to reinterpret the moments of your life.

Our lives offer countless moments worth appreciating, yet we often cling to the few that bring us disappointment or worry. We focus so intensely on what went wrong that we overlook the beauty of what went right. 

The real task is not to rewrite our entire lives, but simply rotate our perspective a little. Just enough to discover another meaning hidden within the same moment. Perhaps, it is time to rewrite the meanings we attach to our lives. So get up, do stupid things, laugh, stop trying so hard to be perfect and allow yourself to simply be your authentic self. 

Sometimes all it takes is turning the word—or the moment—upside down to realise that it was meaningful all along.