It's Not You, It's Me

Relationships. What the hell are they? I get wanting to have a best friend that you can bond with on intimate levels AND go on adventures with. I understand needing to have a person, your person, someone to know you like the back of their hand, support you, and encourage you. But despite the practicality of these basic yet crucial characteristics, I feel as though we are conditioned, or rather we are emotionally inclined, to seek after a relationship for all of the wrong reasons.

Some relationships appear to be diversions. Something to distract yourself from soul searching, from getting to know your true self, who you are, what you are made of, what you seek in life. You don't want to get to know your deepest, truest self? No problem! Get to know this dude instead. Because that makes so much sense, right? Dedicate your emotional and daily life to learning about and falling in love with another human because the thought of learning about yourself and falling in love with yourself is just so exhausting. Or scary. Or overwhelming. 

I get it, I truly do! I was there once, I was there last week. We seek out emotional companionship, intimate connections, and a union of support because we need a crutch. We need someone to get us by, to teach us about life and about love and what our hearts are capable of. But what about you? What about your soul and all of the things you've never learned about yourself? What about your deepest thoughts that you can't even tell yourself, let alone your significant other?

Not all people/relationships are like this, that's not what I am getting at. Some of you out there have done the soul searching. You've gone to the movie alone, eaten the expensive dinner, table for one. You have gone to sleep alone every night for the last year. You've gotten home from work, cooked up one chicken breast and laughed -or cried- alone. You've taken the hiatus from intimacy, for whatever reasons, and turned inward. You've experienced yourself in the darkest, deepest corners of your soul. You know what you need, what you want, what you desire, and what you desire to never be. You've came clean with your issues of denial and the aspects of your life and of yourself that need to be faced. You did it all on your own and that is truly magnificent. Congratulations, you have learned how to love yourself, each and every bit of you. 

So my point here is this: We all need someone to connect to. We all need someone to love and be loved by, with whom we can explore life and all it encompasses. But we need two of them, and one is yourself. You need to love and be loved, by yourself and your partner. You need to discover and experience profound joy, with yourself and with your partner. You need to feed your soul, to explore it and learn how it grows with each and every breath, as well as learning about your partner's life/love and where it fits into your journey. You can't do any of this, I mean you really can't get anywhere deep, without knowing your true soul better than your subconscious desires. 

What if I'm wrong, what if you simply don't see things this way? Well that's just fine but here's what will probably happen if you neglect your self discovery and put discovery of someone else first. You will find a him, or a her, and you will fall into an unhealthy projection of a partnership that echoes and pokes your deepest, darkest wounds. You will be lost in denial of what truly makes your heart ache because you feed it with the love of someone else, who may not always be able to be that tape and glue for you. You will search in his/her eyes daily for reassurance of who you are and what you are meant to be. You will constantly need validation that they are going to stick around because you have discovered their soul before yours, without them you are empty. Or so you'll think. 

In order to not end this on a pretty negative thought, I urge you all to fall deeply, madly, and irrationally in love with yourself. You crave companionship? Desire? Passion? Support? Go within and find the endless supply of love and strength you have to discover. I gaurentee, I PROMISE that as soon as you do this, as soon as you decide to be your person, another one will come along. And they will be your second person. You will fall in love with them and they with you, for you will both have one very important thing in common. Unconditional love for self. And when you love yourself always and forever, no matter what happens, well how could someone else not love you too? 

A Lost Heart Freshly Discovered

I don't know about you, but the last few weeks have been kicking my ass into shape. There have been epiphanies and lessons galore, some of the most life changing for me so far. One of the realizations I have been working through recently has turned out to be one of the most important lessons I have yet to learn in this life. I am having difficulty swallowing it and living in it truthfully, so I find it most productive to speak it out loud to others, in turn speaking my truth to myself.

If you are reading this, then you have a truth you must speak as well. The bigger the pill to swallow, the bigger the gulp of water. So fill up your glasses now, because this is a big one for me and I bet you have a big pill to swallow yourself as well. Here it goes!




I go back to that time, the time in which my world stood still. I hold the hollow me who sits in those moments, brain dead from fear. I hold her as she cries, I sing to her as she shakes and sobs. I sing of love, how it never ceases to exist.

I tell her how everything will eventually be okay, how she can't see it yet but she will discover another great love. And when that time comes, she will know of another way to love, one that fits the cookie cutter shape that is now her new heart. Shaped by the life she has lived thus far, shaped by the cracks in her soul.

I tell her that it is okay to step out of that jail cell, it is okay to leave those frames that play in her mind like a film stuck on repeat. The frames that depict the trauma, pain, fear, and loss. It is okay to leave that behind. It was the love and change that has made her who she is today so she can let go of the pain and frozen parts of her, for all they will take with them when they leave is her darkness.

Let go. Let go. I tell her to let her hands release the grasp and push those moments out to sea, rescuing her hollow self from the disaster aboard, sending it away to where it belongs. In the past.

I wish to no longer seal myself off from the world. I wish to leave the place within me in which I have been trapped, frozen in time that does not move. I am not frozen, I am moving forward. I am not lost, I am discovering myself everyday. The hollow self that I have rescued from that awful time will thank me when someone comes along and wishes to teach me how to love again.

I don't have to stay prisoner to that death, I don't have to sacrifice the rest of my life in order to keep the memories and love that are left behind. Those moments live in me, in my structure and in my soul, forever acting as the foundation of the life I have yet to live. There is so much life out there to build on top of the part of me that exists in this moment, and the parts that have withered and cracked will forever make me who I am, no matter how deep those cracks run.

Entertain Me While I Wait For The Rest Of My Life To Begin

As I sit here on my favorite roof top, watching the sun sink below the horizon, I realize it represents my life. A part of me died last summer and this whole time since, I have been entertaining myself. Playing games and seeking answers while I wait for the birth of my new life. When will my sun set? When will the life that I have struggled with become the old? When will the new life I am so desperately and patiently waiting for show itself?

My sun will set when it's ready. I stay in limbo because that is what I tell myself. I tell myself to wait and hang in suspension until someone gives me permission to set and rise again. Well that's bullshit. The universe doesn't decide when my new life begins, you don't decide, and I sure as hell can't wait until I decide because at this rate, that will never happen. 

The sun that shines on the life I no longer live needs to set, bringing the dark and the unknown with it. This needs to happen so that the sun will rise back up, illuminating the things that are missing and the things that present themselves, brand new with the tag still intact. After all, what good is a life of tragedy without the paradise that follows? 

I put in my time. I served my sentence of struggle and I am ready for my sun to set. To say goodbye to the world that controlled my everything. I am done entertaining myself while I wait for the first day of the rest of my life because the sun is ready to rise, and no sun can bring itself to rise if it has yet to set on the skyline. Bring the darkness, the shadows. Lower the final curtain and take a bow, for the entertainment has ended. And when the sun rises in the morning, I will welcome the bright and shining novelty like the birds welcome the morning rays of golden light. 

Hello, new life. I have been waiting for you. 

Don't Let The World Dim Your Shine!

Ever since I was younger, I have always loved to write. It wasn't the act itself or the product I wound up with that lit me up, but rather the emotion and energy that I put into the words. The way that I could express my thoughts through the written word felt freeing and empowering. No matter how people reacted to my writing, I felt on top of the world when someone would read it. Until I got further into my journey of education, and writing became a harshly judged assignment.

Being the only subject in school that is partially graded using a biased opinion of personal creativity, writing became a modality of disappointment in my life. There I was, blissfully expressing my mind through writing and when I turned it in to receive a grade, the teacher/professor used harsh opinion to express how they personally felt about my writing. This was usually a negative comment. Perhaps it was due to my lack of effort learning grammar or specific, advanced terminology. Or maybe because I had issues following the prompt the way that the teacher expected of us. Regardless, the way that my writing was judged as I grew up and went through different systems of education, always ended in disappointment in myself, in my ability to express my thoughts, and in my intelligence. A bad grade was a bad grade but a negative, written comment on my expression of thoughts was very discouraging.

One of the biggest things we will regret at the end of our lives is caring more about what other people think than our own self expression. This experience, this life, it's only going to last as long as it does. You will only be this version of yourself for as long as it lasts. Eventually, the journey will end. What does your soul need to do while you are here, just as you are? What do you desire to experience that you are too afraid or too inhibited by judgment to do? Set. Yourself. Free.

So that is exactly what I did. I realized that since I had stopped taking college courses, writing didn't have to be just for an assignment like it had almost always felt. I suddenly felt led to write for myself when my life took a crazy turn. I had to document my experiences in a journal just to move through them and understand the immense changes I was going through. This led to the discovery that my writing was actually a beautiful tool of release and not a sack of junk that my school teachers had always led me to believe. I felt the passion and emotion in my writing, I felt the emotional release when I wrote about things that made my heart ache. I discovered the feeling of pride in myself again when people read my writing, except this time they had positive feedback rather than judgment! 

I was stunned at how much growth I had experienced when it came to my writing skills. Or is it possible that I was just never open to believing that I could create beautiful experiences through my words with all of those critical adults telling me how sub par my writing skills were? Was I distracted from a natural ability because I chose to listen to the opinions of others? I missed out on years of loving myself through writing just because I told myself "they are right, I am no good." Not anymore!

I knew that I had something good going on with the way that I expressed my thoughts through writing because it felt good to me... but I assumed that the critics in my life knew more about myself and my abilities than I did. Looking back now, it seems so ridiculous that I would give others that sort of power in my life, but I did and now I am left with the thought, "why?" Because I didn't yet see that knowing my own worth was more important than listening to the opinions of others. I let the world dim my shine, I let critics and naysayers take away something that I truly enjoyed doing and that comes natural to me. For years I kept myself from writing, something that ended up saving my sanity when my world came crashing down.

Now, writing is something that I do nearly everyday. I believe my words help heal myself and those who may take something from them. I also believe that whatever it is I put out there through my writing can also inspire each and every mind that skims over them. I will forever print my thoughts on paper through the oddly fasincating shapes we call letters, watching the world change because of it, all the while refusing to regress into the version of me that let the world dim my shine for so long. 

This shine is never going away, not at the hands of anyone but my own. I encourage each and every individual that is brought to these words for a reason to NEVER let the world take away who you are. Don't let other people control your life experience, don't give them the power to make you feel as if you shouldn't be yourself or that there isn't inherent worth within your self-expression. In the end, those who pass us by and give a glance of non-acceptance serve no purpose on our journeys except to teach us of this very lesson. The lesson of self acceptance and unconditional love, because with these aspects of your being intact, every single form of self expression is a beautiful kiss on this world, left for all to see who we really are and why we are here.

Your light is your legacy and no one else's. Shine bright, all of you beautiful, unique souls! Never let the world dim your shine :)