Discovering...
I do my best not to measure myself according to others and others according to myself. When I catch myself doing this only two emotions present themselves: feelings of being less than or complete disillusionment with the human condition. I practice acceptance only because if I don't I can quickly spiral into that angsty apathy I used to drown myself in. Not knowing how to find gratitude in anything was most depressing. My knowledge of Life was based on finding those quick fixes and the next after that before I had time to feind for a distraction. I used to pride myself on being the escape artist. It began by practicing disacosiation using only mind tricks but it wasn't too long after that my imagination began to fail me and so I turned to obsessive reading, box cutters and pipes. For so long I thought myself as self sufficient and it isn't that I recognize it as such today but something I used to use as my personal mantra.
The emptiness became comforting until I realized that even when I wanted to care I couldn't. My driving instinct was to destroy something beautiful and no, I don't mean that in the obvious sense but rather, a much more deeper yet simpler way: I wanted to destroy a life. I fought to corrupt and extinguish any possible opportunity to thrive, to excel, to feel alive. Happiness was not my warm gun, as The Beatles sang, self destruction was. The bullets singed and disfigured but never killed my target. I didn't know whether to consider it a blessing or a curse. Until I decided to allow something else to drive me.
Today, the gratitude overwhelms me. At times I find myself filled with appreciation for everything and at others I look to grasp for it in anything. Regardless, I try to remember that I have NEVER had it better. My long life dreams are beginning to seep back in and I see the possibility. No, I believe in the possibility. I go to sleep counting his heart beat in the palm of my hand where as before I would pass out waiting for the next high so I wouldn't have to sleep; so I wouldn't have to "come to" another day with that same desperation and the same mission in mind. I figured staying awake to it was better than waking up to it. Rationalizations kept me sick. Metzy still speaks, loudly sometimes...too loud at others...but, she no longer controls me because the impulse to react, to run hard and fast, has been replaced with peace and the want to stay in that frame of space. I no longer work for me and my supposed "needs" (which, in reality, boil down to wants that distract me). Today I ask to be an instrument of my understanding of the guiding force of my universe because I still have those feelings of inadequacy. Those thoughts of "who cares" and "if not me someone else." But, why not me? I look forward to the small miracles I encounter and that are granted to me. Those things have breathed life into me. By asking the God I have sought to keep me openminded to Him I have found another purpose to stay alive...and it is not of my own Will but of His.
The emptiness became comforting until I realized that even when I wanted to care I couldn't. My driving instinct was to destroy something beautiful and no, I don't mean that in the obvious sense but rather, a much more deeper yet simpler way: I wanted to destroy a life. I fought to corrupt and extinguish any possible opportunity to thrive, to excel, to feel alive. Happiness was not my warm gun, as The Beatles sang, self destruction was. The bullets singed and disfigured but never killed my target. I didn't know whether to consider it a blessing or a curse. Until I decided to allow something else to drive me.
Today, the gratitude overwhelms me. At times I find myself filled with appreciation for everything and at others I look to grasp for it in anything. Regardless, I try to remember that I have NEVER had it better. My long life dreams are beginning to seep back in and I see the possibility. No, I believe in the possibility. I go to sleep counting his heart beat in the palm of my hand where as before I would pass out waiting for the next high so I wouldn't have to sleep; so I wouldn't have to "come to" another day with that same desperation and the same mission in mind. I figured staying awake to it was better than waking up to it. Rationalizations kept me sick. Metzy still speaks, loudly sometimes...too loud at others...but, she no longer controls me because the impulse to react, to run hard and fast, has been replaced with peace and the want to stay in that frame of space. I no longer work for me and my supposed "needs" (which, in reality, boil down to wants that distract me). Today I ask to be an instrument of my understanding of the guiding force of my universe because I still have those feelings of inadequacy. Those thoughts of "who cares" and "if not me someone else." But, why not me? I look forward to the small miracles I encounter and that are granted to me. Those things have breathed life into me. By asking the God I have sought to keep me openminded to Him I have found another purpose to stay alive...and it is not of my own Will but of His.