It’s Time: How To Be A Person Of Substance

I’m still putting together this slideshow. Seeing the pictures of this year and trying to trace the journey back to how everything got so broken up. The family I love and care for got so broken up and shaken apart.

It’s not that dire. But I feel us slipping and drifting and I want to put the brakes on.

I hate the world for never stopping. I hate the world for moving on and things for changing all the time. I want the change but I hate it at the same time.

If something isn’t broken, it doesn’t need to be fixed.

It doesn’t need to change.

Something changed this year. I grew up or got older or started to move away from the people who have been the bedrock and foundation of my life for the last thirty years. Something changed in the chemicals of my brain and I tried to start building friendships that resembled an idealized version of life in a video game.

I did that.

I hope whatever I did to divide us can be reversed. I hope I can be a catalyst and unite us towards a common cause again – the cause of this amazing family and all these people I love coming together to celebrate. I just want to celebrate with you through dance and song like we used to. Instead of all these drugs and alcohol getting in the way. Instead of ignoring and turning away from the love that is there. Are people happier, though…for the change?

I got lost. I threw myself at the world in angsty, emotional agony because my heart was broken. I’m not even sure who broke it. I think I did. I think I was depressed and hurting and fell in love with shadows and broke my own heart and sucked all of these souls up in the vortex of my life.

I keep pulling these people together. I keep making them come together to satisfy this strange desire in my chest. In my growling stomach. I NEED TO CONSUME YOU. I NEED YOU TO COME TOGETHER.

What is this urge within me that craves togetherness of all the people I care about? I wanted to be a person of substance for the last nine months and I thought I did that by sticking to my word. The last three weeks I’ve almost undone nine months worth of effort with canceling, tardiness, and NOT BEING A MAN OF MY WORD. But I got sick. And tired. And sick again. And tired…

I got tired of caring so much. I got tired of trying to be someone I’m not.

A poor, angry girl. Straddling worlds and circles and stratospheres. I’m a poor, angry, dirty girl with too many rings around my belly now and an empty womb where another soul could go. I could bring another lonely life into this world. Fill it with all my fantasies and failings and fortitudes.

I could make castles in the air and underwater and I could sing this new soul to sleep every night because I know the lyrics to so many songs.

In choosing to be a person of substance to others, I have ignored the basic rule: TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE.

Passed all the tests. Examined the life worth living. Made tough choices. Put faith in my values and moral compass and the collected experience of 30 years to do the right thing. DO THE RIGHT THING.

The right thing is always to choose love. Not to break love. Not to hurt the ones we love with our own selfish, base desires. But create better boundaries instead. And those that love us will understand. Those that exchange love with a mutual understanding of humane compassion will understand.

All the others will fall away.

I thought I could make myself into a person of substance.

Turns out, I already was one.

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