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Atlas

Sometimes self hate looks like trivializing your own trauma; comparing your handle on pain to others’ handles, with your superficial understanding of their metaphysical navigation.

Sometimes self love looks like you beginning to understand that you are strong beyond measure because the things you go through are heavy for you. So heavy, in fact, that you are weighed down. And that weight you feel is in your mind but also outside of it because it textures the fabric of your life. Yet, this weight is sometimes lifted. You are able to move around under it. Yes, it forms the clouds above you and that is it’s own grey issue. But the weight is sometimes lifted, and you are the one lifting it.

So the next time you doubt your own suffering, the next time you feel like you should not be weighed down by the triviality you have decided is your life, understand that you are brave beyond measure, strong beyond will, and that part of the measure of a good life is our willingness to continue shouldering  our barely manageable burdens long enough to receive our light.

Inspiration Prose et Poesie
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Society in Motion

Forgive them

Forgive us

Forgive the deep parts within you cannot trust

 

Time spent but never earned because this is a bus with no stops 

The fog in the rear is not slipping into the exhaust

It is purged

We are running, leaving it behind.

We cannot earn because we cannot bind

We are dust waiting to return 

We are rust waiting for the sun

To burnish us, turn us to bronze that flickers and wreathes like gold

The gold is nowhere but in our souls

The bronze is all that shows

 

And for what? For us to lose the precious little, trailing away like black smoke that unfolds,

pouring out the maw of a backside, not worth a gather

Not worth the sole you exhaust

Not worth the bronze you won’t buff

The rust that needs to wait for the sunrise to feel lust

Of self

 

None other than heavy mist beyond the veil

The dust and the fog and the time-shares of clutter

How you can breathe through the same pipes where all that sputter and gunk choke the inhale.

Choked

Unprovoked

Choke and roll over and sink down like the sun 

Unable to purge through the rays the bronze run.

Unable to shine and burnish itself to a gold spun by society; to relive that choked one

You know the one

Life. 

Let’s pick up the run.

Journaling Prose et Poesie
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Transparent Markers

In relationships, where is the marker between ego and self respect?

In respect, where is the marker between ego and sense of self?

What do we know about sense of self? My sense of self shifts everyday, from its very foundation. I spend a lot of time oscillating between an understanding of my scope of self and then an understanding of how many of those parts are interacting on a daily basis. 

How many people are convinced that they haven’t looked deep enough into themselves? Like they haven’t peeled back the layers far enough and what they understand to be of self might very well have left a few layers unexplored. What if you’re only a talented liar when it comes to lies you tell yourself?

I’m convinced this is the case with a lot of people who harbor the fear of being hurt, or who have at some point or the other in their lives, decided against the long hard road of emotional unease, opting instead to pretend that something never mattered that much, never got deep enough to hurt them to distraction. That fear of vulnerability is an acceptance of self deception; a contract to lie to oneself for as long as necessary and maybe till the day they die, a bed of uncertainty made that will grow doubt and confusion for a significant portion of one’s life. It’s as simple as this – if I fear my hurt to the point where I am unwilling to feel it all the way through, I will throw up blocks with varying levels of dishonesty in order to build a solid enough labyrinth in my mind to prevent my access to the truth aka the pain. That labyrinth will only serve as the shaky foundation to my continued perception of my self and my values and my strength. This foundation will leave cracks wide enough for anxiety, self doubt, self loathing, and depression to seep in and find purchase. If one is susceptible to these things, at least.

Whenever the day comes that I then want to dig out, break down this house on its shaky foundation, I will find that it’s been welded with a variety of stuff I had no business gathering. Now the chaff and grain are identifying as self, now I identify as part chaff, now I’m doubting my worth. Now I’m doubting me. How does one go about untangling that? And how does the building’s demolition not feel like self destruction? How do you start from scratch when the scratch you’ve so far come to understand has been a lie?

Where is that marker exactly? Where is that sense of self?

Anyway, I’m a stone in this quarry, a sailor on this sea. I’m currently struggling with these questions. I’m on a constant search to find me.

Inspiration Journaling
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Strength

Hi you. Yes, you.

You’ve been telling yourself that you aren’t strong. A direct contradiction to the face you put out every morning; the one others filled with their own expectations and emotions judge you by. And that contradiction is killing you. Slowly.

You’re strong! You’re strong. Not every time, now. Not every hour of every day, and certainly not every day of every week.

It’s okay that you struggle with yourself and your mind, and the anxieties of work, which you can’t stop conflating with the anxieties of life. It’s okay when you feel like the people in your life with whom you can be vulnerable for their strength, no longer have their own secure foundation and so cannot carry you. It’s okay to want to take a break from them then, as you learn. It’s okay, too, to forgive them for being human, even as you forgive yourself for being the same. But then, remember, you are strong. You’ve just gotta pick yourself up.

 

Inspiration Journaling
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Change

People say that people don’t change, which of course, is preposterous. I will admit that getting there is a series of missteps, false starts, false middles and shaky continuums. But if a person does something to surprise you one day – just once – there is change in that. The absolute beauty of the the thing is when they never repeat it. Because from time to time we have to remind ourselves that we are human and that change is a process we haven’t quite wrapped our heads round yet. I have spent the better part of two years trying to change three things in my life. I am now so changed from the person I was back then , I am only now slowly trying to come to terms with it. But would you believe it? None of the things I focused on changing have moved even a little bit in any direction…

It’s the focus on these three though that did the other things, I think.

Journaling
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Trust I

*The word should is used indiscriminately in the snippet below.*

It’s been said that you should be able to trust the people that mean something to you. The operative word being “should”, ha. We are not obligated to trust. Yes, we are born trusting but quickly learn or are forcefully taught… for lack of a better word – Better. No, we don’t have to trust the ones we love fully. I don’t think there should be a love that is totally immersed in trust. But yes, by virtue of loving, we should trust to some capacity. Never all the way. And we SHOULD – please remember that the operative word is always should – be able to completely immerse ourselves in that if we chose. That should be the standard of those we keep close to us anyway. Yet, it would be foolhardy to use all that utopia (for indeed fully trusting is a utopia) all in one place. But wouldn’t it be great if there was a thought, a slim chance that we could?

Journaling
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For Shit’s Sake

Happy New Month!

It’s March! And my first post! I warn you that it will be nothing spectacular. The title IS a precedent, and this is my journal after all.

I have an inordinate amount of fear or apprehension about being caught with my pants down… literally. I take every precaution to ascertain that the least amount of people ever can attribute that stray fart or that relieved sigh following the tinkle (or splash) behind closed doors to me. Call it silliness or some milder form of OCD or whatever. Does it really matter as long as I am plagued with it? There’s something constantly new and exposing about excretion; about the indignity involved in producing waste matter. It’s so unglamorous. But it is out of our control. Really really. Our body is responding in those times to one of the many primal urges it still retains and that leaves me raw, exposed. Human? Lol. Some people probably don’t give a shit (seriously, no pun intended). I give one too many as far as shits (literal or metaphoric) are concerned.

I bring my vulnerability up because today, I stepped into someone else’s quite unintentionally and if I had had but a moment’s notice or warning, I mightn’t have. Not because the person in question fills their time with my petty, air headed musings or because they feel some profound insecurity (which is really what this is all about) about using the loo in public. No, this was the sort of vulnerability I surely must share with another human being or seven billion.

The million dollar question: What do you do with skid marks in someone else’s loo? It’s their loo, it’s their space. The question here isn’t about ownership, its about reaction.

Does your view of that person shift for a nanosecond or for a lifetime? Not a passing judgement, not a hygiene call, your view. The fundamental way you understand them or see them.Do they become more human, more relatable? After those first few seconds of stark revulsion, do you appreciate the humanity in being the uninvited witness of that vulnerability? Do you appreciate the true meaning of six degrees of separation behind the toilet walls?

I did.

I mean, fuck it. My irrationalities will be here tomorrow and probably after that. But for the love of God, I can find an appreciation for that human being who takes a dump and means it. We are human. We shit. We shit and then we die. That is my bible of life’s vicious cycle.

 

Journaling