Try

            I’m going to rant, so leave if you don’t wanna see this.

            I feel like I’ve been forced to come to the conclusion that people are cowards. They hide what they have to say, what they believe in, because they’re insecure, or they’re worried about the outcome, or they’re scared someone will get hurt.

            Well, I’ve got something to say that I’ve been hiding for a while.

            Like everybody else, I don’t try. I don’t try for that solo in choir because I’m scared I won’t be chosen. I don’t try to make new friends because it means opening up more room for more hurt. I don’t try because sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one trying and it doesn’t seem worth it anymore.

            So I’ve been trying to learn to change that, in subtle ways, because I’m not so scared anymore.

            But how can anybody know what they want without trying? How can anybody get what they want without trying?

It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. By the same token, isn’t it better to try and get shot down than to never have tried at all?

The Screams

Never in my life had I heard a scream like the one I heard and wrote about on a whim a few months ago. I'd like to take a few moments to revisit these screams, because I believe in expression, whether someone swears, cries or screams.



   She screams. She screams and does not stop. I'm a believer in honor: honor thy father and mother, the bible says. I'm a believer of it and I hear the screams that are aimed at her mother and father.
   But she screams. She screams and does not stop, in a state of hysteria, a panicked craze enveloping her mind, I'm thinking, and I wish she will stop before someone gets hurt.
   Yet she screams. She screams and does not stop. Her voice echoes up the house to where I'm sitting, carries this far in a house large as this. I'm listening but I do not hear, and I pretend it does not exist.
   Still she screams. She screams and does not stop. And I realize I don't know why, why this shriek has to come about, why I am here to hear it so blatantly obviously from someone I was just speaking to.
   And she screams. She screams and does not stop.



I remember the screams, to a certain degree, but after rewriting all of this, so many months ahead... It makes me wonder about the experience itself, how my perception of the screams today is so different from what I wrote the day I actually heard them. Memories, the past, writing everything down... It makes me wonder what's real.

And what's not.

An Obsession

You know when you know something about yourself that you want nothing but to change, but it has to take an incident to instigate that change? Do you know what I mean when I say that?

            Let’s say you do. Now, I have an obsession—an obsession of the truth.

            To most people, this would seem like a good obsession; no, a great obsession.

            But to me, this obsession has gone beyond control, and it’s time I pull back a little bit.

            I’m judgmental, I’ll admit it, whether I actually tell people my judgments… Well, that’s a different story. The point is, I live life thinking everybody has a certain opinion about me, and I hate it because I feel like I have to live up to the person I’ve always been.

            I never let myself be who I want to be, and people seem to come to the conclusion that I’m this person and nothing will ever change. That in itself is a judgment of me, and I hate that it makes it harder for me to, well, be who I want to be.

            But at the same time, I’ve come to realize, I’m making a certain judgment myself. I’m judging that what everyone wants to see is what they’ve always seen, and I’m not taking into account what they actually want.

            I don’t know if you see how this connects to an obsession of truth. Let me break it down a little more. Often, I make rash judgments of people based on what I know (the same way I think everyone judges me), and sometimes, the facts don’t add up. Sometimes, it’s simply that the facts don’t add up the way I want them to because people tend to say one thing but mean another.

            And the little lies, the little omissions of truth, the little two-faced characters… These plague our world today, and I always want to know what’s really wrong with someone, the real reason they’ve been acting the way they have, what leads to a certain incident.

            Without people telling the truth, I’m forced to guess because of this crazy obsession to know. And I want to stop these judgments, because it makes me act cold, or snobby, to certain people. It conveys me as an ice princess.

            But it’s a wicked cycle of my over-thinking leading to my thinking that everyone judges me, leading to me judging everyone else, leading to a vague sort of truth I can come up with using what I know, making me obsessed. I don’t know if that makes sense.

            However, I do know I want to stop obsessing over knowing everything. No matter how agitated I get by not knowing what a certain person is doing, I need to let life go on and let time take me where I’m supposed to go.

            The world is a slow, slow place, and sometimes I want to skip to the end of the book without messing with all the complexities of life.

            I need to learn to stop shutting people out.

            I want to stop obsessing and… be a better person.

Vagueness and its Ambiguities

            I recently read a friend’s post about vagueness and the benefits of being direct. What I sincerely love is that I was just discussing this very issue with my mother. Now, my mother is a constant source of inspiration for me. Oh, she’s a nag—aren’t all mothers—but she manages to get people to talk.

            By being direct.

            Communication is one of the most important factors of life. Granted, some people have a problem with this—whether they think too much, or they simply want to hide everything they feel so that they don’t have to face the facts.

            Life is full of vagueness and it’s full of ambiguities. Some people don’t have a problem facing the straight out facts. I’d say I’m one of these people, probably because I’ve had a bumblebee mother always there for me. Like I said, she’s a source of inspiration. She’s taught me the importance of facing the facts.

            Whether it’s psychological issues, insecurities, family problems and whatnot, people shove things under the rug. The facts are ugly, life is ugly, and nobody likes to be reminded of that.

            But without facing the facts… How is life life? How is anyone living? It’s all fake if life is lived without facing what’s real. The hurt, the pain, the jealousies… They don’t go away when they’re hidden, and if they’re hidden, they are built until the rug can’t hide them anymore.

            Which is when the person collapses under the heavy weight of the ugly facts. And the ugly facts, believe me, are ugly. Nevertheless, they have to be confronted at one point or another.

            It’s the only way we can grow.