Love or Fear: The Choice Is Yours

Can’t sleep. I will soon. I think the primary problem is I feel like I can’t write. When I am angry I don’t want to write. I am angry. I don’t feel like writing or having ideas. This is what alcoholism does to me and I don’t even get to drink it. There is a feeling of helplessness in not being able to help all the people you love. I love a lot of people, leading to the helplessness compounding. I don’t even care about people’s supposed vices and problems. I just want them to be happy and they are not. Misery abounds. The more I love life the more I want to share that. I don’t know how. I don’t want to hurt people and confronting your misery hurts at first. 

I have studied the positive thinking movement. I don’t think life is about ignoring reality or pretending everything is always okay. Balance is the answer. Balance in knowing that when there is bad there will once again be good. Balance in knowing your past and where you came from and looking forward to the future without the regrets of past mistakes or the worries about things to come that are out of our control. I like it when I have a focus or a point to write about. 

I find I spend most of my time just contemplating life. Meditation is described as the clearing of the mind. I think that is a good start but a bad description of the goal. To me it seems more about letting life and its energy in the form of thoughts flow freely through you without questioning why they are happening. If you are completely alright with who you are in your life it should be good how you got to be here no matter how hard it was and it should be good to be headed wherever you are going because it is your path alone that you are forging. 

You are only allowed one perspective in this life. You never will hear someone else’s thoughts or see what someone else sees. Writing, movies, and all art try and accomplish this but it’s always an inadequate attempt at knowing what it would be like to not be you. Even when you read a pointed story or a song with specific lyrics, you can never fully know how the artist’s mind thought of it. You can only know the representation of their thoughts that they are trying to share with you. Will anyone ever read this drivel? 

I just watched a funny movie about the end of the world. I prefer my comedy dark and gritty. It’s interesting that morbid is a word with a negative connotation. There are only two certainties in life, birth and death, everything in between is subject to change.
There are two fundamental sides of life, love and fear. Hate is what many people would describe as the opposite of love; there would be no hate without fear. Hate is bred from insecurity. We fear the unknown. We fear what is similar to us because it makes us confront our own problems and perceived flaws. We fear standing up to and confronting other people and so instead we hate them. Hate is for cowards. 

They call it brave to shoot an assailant. It is never brave to take a life out of your own fear. I call it brave to try and understand how someone could be hurting so badly. Try to understand how someone can be so afraid that they are blind to the beauty of all it means to live and breathe, by hate.

Where was the beginning of consciousness? Is this a planet full of other conscious beings we never take the time to try and communicate with? Some people do but as a larger culture we don’t. We treat animals as slaves to humans, our resource to consume. If we met alien life on another planet and it looked like a Rhino would we try and talk to it? What if it looked like a virus? 

We magnify the skies. We magnify ourselves. Does all this magnification lead us to better understanding? For some of us it does. There is still a hierarchy of knowledge. We as a culture spend very little time trying to reach people who we deem beneath us. Everyone has someone who they deem beneath them. No one is beneath me; I am connected to everything through forces we don’t yet fully understand. 

Division is keeping us unhappy. Fear is what causes this division. My greatest act of fearlessness is constantly relearning to trust other people. We are taught to think we are mere animals. Animals display as much cellular complexity as we do as human beings. Our water that we drink is filled with tons of things we assume are not there because we can’t see them. Scientists know they are there. We walk around as if blind we would know the world of seeing. We assume because we don’t know how to see things that they are not real. 

We used to not know how to see cells. They were an idea. We used to not know how to see an atom. Now we can split one, what a good idea that was. Now well renowned scientists of lengthy careers refuse to discuss the existence of quarks. What will we know in 50 years that we do not now? Think about all the things we didn’t know 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago and beyond. We are constantly evolving, ever learning. To insist on being a person who always stays the same is to deny who you really are. 

Friends who haven’t seen me in 10 years understand who I am the essence that has always been me. I found my greatest weakness in putting myself out there and really connecting with people on a deeper level is actually my greatest strength. I was made to believe I was naïve and foolish for this trust, this desire to want to connect with other people. I have always said, once you really know someone, know where they came from, and know what they’ve been through, it is impossible not to love them. 

The problem in this world is that everyone fears strangers. We fear anything we don’t already know. This fear stops us from creating vast communities of connection because we don’t want to be confronted with the fact that everyone will hurt you at some point. Everyone makes mistakes. The thing that makes a mistake a mistake is that is inadvertently hurts someone else. There is a casualty. 

We are living in a world of mistakes. I just want my life to be about helping the people I love and some of them don’t even want to talk to me because of it. I have no value to this world unless I make a weekly paycheck and pay my taxes like a good little girl. It doesn’t matter that I want to change the world. It doesn’t matter that all I see around me is pain and emotional abuse, rampant drug addiction, people so detached from their reality they don’t even know why they must pay the bills they pay, why must they do the job they do. They don’t question why they are living every day in pain. We just assume life is pain. 

Pain is an important part of life but we could be trying harder to minimize it. If the world was going to end in a few weeks and we all knew it, what would be your top priority? Writing might be meaningless if the whole would was disintegrated. What use is keeping a record if it won’t persist into the future? That’s the thing though. I would still do it. I don’t do it for anyone but me because it is what I love. I hope I’d gain the courage to sing. When you have nothing left to lose shouldn’t fear disappear? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. I suppose it depends on what kind of person you are. 

Perhaps some relationships aren’t worth saving, if only because I believe in personal choice. It is my choice whether or not to participate in someone’s painful life. Just as it is their choice to live it. Even when I’m not there it weighs heavily on my mind. I have a sea of people in my dreams who I never stopped loving. Call it a savoir complex perhaps. I don’t know why. I am so alright with me. I am the person I want to be almost all the time. 

I want everyone to know real freedom, and even I don’t know that. I know what I imagine it to be like, freedom to learn at your own pace, in your own way, freedom to love whomever you want, whenever you want, freedom from the jealousy that persists in this culture. All judgments we make on others are routed in jealousy which is caused by fear. 

Somehow we were taught to believe that love is finite. That once we love one person and another, we have less and less to give with every person added to the list. This is entirely false. Love is a learned behavior and energy, just like fear. The more you practice loving other people the more people you are capable of containing in your web of love. Love is infinite. It is the light that binds us together. Hate cannot drive out hate because life is a balance. Light drives out the dark, and darkness makes us appreciate the light. One cannot exist without the other. 

I don’t want to take a medication that eliminates the intense feelings of life’s ups and downs. Life is just a ride. Perhaps people who’ve never made an unsafe choice are truly happy. I certainly wouldn’t know. I have pushed my boundaries and tested my limits. I lived to tell about it. But the important part is that I’ve lived. I’ve loved and lost and lived to love again. 
I used to loath goodbyes; they felt final as a child. I thought I’d never see people again if they left me. I now know that is the farthest thing from the truth. I am always amazed by the random ways that life brings meaningful people back into my life time and time again. 

I could never have been a formal writer. I do everything wrong. I speak in slang; I use too many descriptive words. I should use different words instead of very this or extremely that. But would that help anyone understand what the fuck I am trying to say? 

I have been having a hard time trying to write dialog. As a kid I would lie awake at night for hours imagining conversations with people I knew that never happened. I stopped doing that because it was very disappointing when nothing ever seemed to work as well in reality as it did in my mind. One mind communicates far more effectively with itself than two minds do communicating with each other. 

I love getting to know people. I always want to hear their stories. I spent a lifetime in a hair salon. I spent a childhood hearing other people tell stories: Stories about their families, stories about their jobs, their heartaches, their struggles, and their triumphs. Some of those stories are entirely made up. That’s the beauty of people, through elaborate lies we can create lives we’ve never had. There wouldn’t be a very good fiction selection if no one knew how to lie. Sometimes we lie to protect people. Someone we lie just for fun. Some people are telling stories, and we assume they are lying, but to them everything they are saying is the truth; The truth from their perspective. The truth as they have seen it. We may think they are batshit crazy. Their family may tell us they never did the things they say they did, they don’t have the family or life they think they have. But maybe to them, they do. 

Who are we to decide what another person’s reality looks like, we will never know. Most people don’t know they were born artists. Most people aren’t trying actively to express, to the people they love and the world, what they see and what they know. What we see as an elaborate lie meant to hurt us is probably more likely designed to protect them or their mind from a hurtful truth. 

Finding your truth is a painful process in this world. We don’t have a universal way to help people understand the phases of life they are going through. We all wander through life trying not to change things too much, trying not to disturb the peace, rock the boat, or throw a wrench in the gears. You are not a cog in a machine. Machines are simplistic recreations of ideas learned from observing the complexities that exist in life. As technology advances to further complexity it more closely resembles life. Some people think they are simple creatures. Those people know absolutely nothing about themselves. 

I am starting to overcome my inability to stop picking at perceived imperfections in my body. It’s not even about societies expectations of my body; I have a specific manifestation to pick at my skin as if there is something constantly wrong with it. If there is a problem, it is only bad wiring in my brain of how I perceive my world. 

In this world money has the ability to deny you contentment. Food, water, and shelter cost more than many people can afford. How can that be? We live in a world of abundance. Technology has advanced so much farther than almost anyone could have imagined and yet so many go without. 

I don’t want to live in a world of fear any longer. Drastic changes in human consciousness don’t happen in a day. What is a day? It’s amazing how every day seems the same until you look back and realize everything is different now. I never feel like I am making enough progress. When I look back I cannot believe how far I’ve come. I try and remind myself when so many days feel the same. I know soon they will be more different than I realize as it is happening. 

I know I am doing right by being who I am. I want more people to have satisfaction that they really know who they are and are living the life they want to lead to the best of their ability until they can move forward and be even closer to the end. Accomplishments and success are nonexistent. They are abstract concepts of our created language. All that will remain of you when you are gone is the energy you left in the electromagnetic hearts and electrifying minds of those you loved deeply enough to share yourself with.