The Gloves Are Off

  Small epiphanies: I wrote in my recent book about how what's hurt and continues to hurt me outwardly in my life hasn't been the bad stuff.  It's been all the nothing.  The empty.  So, abuse, trouble, complications, fighting and conflict don't upset me like they upset most people, because they are a break from being ignored, from being treated like I never existed.  They allow me to connect, to speak, to maybe even be heard. 

  It's always when I am shut out, not given a chance to connect, that I am being hurt worst of all.  You can try to slap me across the face, you can wreck my stuff, but do not ignore me and walk away.  That's what actually does lasting, to-the-quick damage that is hard-wired to all the worst things that ever happened to me, starting at the beginning of me.

  That was the outside.  The inside is related.  What hurts me on the inside is having to keep good stuff inside.  I need to hope more than I need hopes to be fulfilled.  I need to love far more than I need to be loved in return.  I need to give far more than I need to receive. In fact, I need to hope, to love and to give so much more than I need to see them as "good ideas", that it's more than worth it for me to simply love people and things that are incapable of loving me, to hope in things that may never pay off, and to give, even if there is no indication I will ever receive in return. I actually need to do those things to be human and be alive, and I certainly need to do them to be me and even want to live through the day.

  Because not seeing hopes come to fruition, not being loved, not receiving kindness from other people?  All that is a little depressing, but I'm good and used to it, and I can live with it.  I've lived with it my whole life.  The others are deeper.  They are non-negotiable.  Because I need to be myself more than I need to make choices that work out well for me.  I have love to give, I have dreams and aspirations, and I sometimes want to give people stuff.  That's what I need.  It all needs to flow out, no matter what happens next.

  So it's time to be selfish.  I will damn well be myself.  I will damn well go right ahead being me too.  Damn common sense, damn conventional wisdom and damn being cautious and sensible.  Damn looking for guarantees and payoffs and sure-fire things that seem to be working out.  Above all things damn fear.  

  It seems to come down to, sometimes, being sensible or being inspired.  And being inspired looks nothing like being sensible.  And it looks a lot more like whim.  And whim is dangerous and far from guaranteed.  Yet it is essentially human.

  I'm done being sensible.  The gloves are off.