I am not fit to judge. I am not better or worse than you or anyone else. I have no right to point fingers nor am I fit to say who is righteous and who should be saved, who could be fixed, and who will always be broken.
I have no time for talks like this.
And one more thing . . .
I do not think I should listen to judgments or to the predictions that assume that my failures are nothing short of guaranteed — and neither should you, by the way.
Come to think of it, failure is an interesting word.
Who says that failing is so wrong?
Why is this such a terrible word?
How can anyone ever succeed without failure in their resume?
Perhaps this is like a test when we were kids, and the learning curve is a real thing.
See?
Life is hard. Lessons are learned and the tough ones are tough for a reason. However, as for the discussion of failure, I would like to take a stand.
I want to say that there is a difference between failing to achieve and the failure to try.
How many times have we failed to try?
How many times have we looked back and wished we “took a shot,” or gave someone or something a chance? And now?
What happens when the past is so far back in the rearview mirror?
We find ourselves overthinking a moment when we failed to dare or, in my case, I often look back and wish I could kick myself for leaving something unsaid or undone.
I wish I could scold the old version of myself or even punch myself in the face for not taking the chances.
There are so many times and some are more intense and specific. Yet, there are too many pivotal moments when I chose to turn left instead of right or vice versa.
However, it is clear that I cannot undo my past.
I cannot unsay what was said. I cannot rewind nor can I reclaim or relitigate what took place.
I cannot negotiate what happened or rationalize my actions—and ah, but the mind—this is where the problems live. This is where the ideas have lingered and engrained themselves into my cognitive patterns to which this is how we never shale the patterns from our past.
(Until we change.)
We think.
We try to readdress what happened or we look to find accountability for the different tensions, or the sadness, or the pain, and so we store the memories away, and we file them, and we stick what happened in some disorganized folder, and we confuse ourselves in miscategorized files, and then?
We hold ourselves to a series of misinterpretations of what happened.
We keep ourselves imprisoned in the jail cells of mistruths and internal lies.
Or better yet, we lock ourselves up, bolted and chained with padlocks and all, and we keep ourselves enslaved, or we hold ourselves captive and thus, we become encapsulated by this hardened sap of miscalculated files.
I see this as almost the same as a fossilized termite which has been forever preserved in the auburn colored sap from a tree—only the tree is our life, and the sap is a build up of our teary and misled truths which has encased us in a series of ideas and misperceptions.
We are locked and fossilized, or in our eyes, we are hardened and crusted like a failure to launch. Hence, this is who we were, so this is all we could ever be.
I write to you this way, as if to create a flower from my sadness.
I write to you like this in the darkness of an early morning. I have candles lit, which is the first time in a long time, since I last wrote to you beside the candlelight.
I am no one in the sense that I have the right to stand over anyone else or to claim anything so perfect or righteous.
I am gratefully imperfect.
I am here in the solace of morning. Speaking of morning, I am also a person who has an in-depth understanding of mourning, as in bereavement itself, or in the case of mourning, I understand the grief of loss, and the depth of someone’s absence and whether alive or dead, I can see how people grieve the loss of someone alive too, as in lost, or as in a life that is no longer with me, or how we make moves that will forever alter our pathway, and nothing will ever be the same again.
I understand this.
I know what it’s like to be lost and yes, more than anything, I know what it’s like to be found.
(But you already knew this.)
I have lived through a year of doubt and turmoil, despair and sadness. Yet, even in the worst of my moments, I have chosen to take steps or made decisions—to keep me alive.
I have never seen myself as someone “in-shape,” as they say. However, I am 80lbs down from my heaviest weight. I am a constant work in progress.
I am a person who understands where I have failed or failed to try, and I am one of those people too, you know?
What I mean is:
I have self-sabotaged, imploded, exploded, and yes, I have gone crazy more than once or perhaps more than twice a day.
It is easy to see the wrongs and easier to notice the invisible scars. As I send this out to the universe, I write this to you, not as someone special or as a person who knows anything better and, of course, I do not have the secret nor can I explain the secret to my endurance.
I suppose all this means is, “I’m here.”
And I’ll always be here.
All I can say is that if failing is an action, then so is success. Thus, I have successfully moved from one day to the next, complaints and all, and pain or heartache, and no matter what happened, or no matter how much I thought about quitting or “hanging it up,” as I used to call it, or no matter what happened or how bad the news might have been (and trust me some days the news was unthinkable), I have managed to get up out of bed, put my feet on the floor, and I still got up. Damned if I didn’t!
I still showed up. Liked or not.
Loved or otherwise.
I was asked how to stop from sliding backwards.
My answer was I keep moving forward.
I might not always succeed at this. I might not gain much or move ahead or cover so much ground that I can see the past is moving farther away.
Then again, it’s hard to see victory when you’re in the thick of a loss.
It’s hard to see your own progression. It’s hard to realize that throughout all of our so-called failures, we have successfully gained and moved, and we have successfully managed to make a failure become our secret for success.
The secret ingredient here is endurance.
Failure is part of the way.
That’s all.
You have to get up.
You have to endure, as in to refuse to give way, and to refuse to stop, no matter what; and to endure, to withstand, to stand up. even if it hurts, and be ready to be counted — and to get up, no matter what, no matter how it hurts, no matter who it was that hurt you, even if it was you who hurt you the most — or even in the despair of heartache and loneliness, or even in the blindness of our emotional hysterics, or in the blurry vision from eyes that have cried so hard, and so much, and for so long that seeing clearly is not only unthinkable too, but more, you have to keep going even when the idea of seeing clearly again is more like an impossibility.
I am going to expose something here, right now, and this has nothing to do with me, so much as this has more to do with a testament or a qualifying expression of, say, a meaningful gesture from one person to another.
I have lived with this “thing” for as long as I can remember. I have lived with this cancerous idea, like the ideas that I am somehow ugly or somewhat disfigured, or malformed, and that I am misshapen, or misaligned with the world, or that no matter how hard I try, no matter what clothes I wear, and no matter how I try to fancy up my accent or speak, or even here—regardless to whether I am good or not or whether my prose is seen as worse than a child’s or an amateur, or whether I ever get the chance to make my way—there has always been this “thing” that’s been with me, which is like a malignant weed in the soil of my thinking.
I have lived this way for as long as I can remember.
There has always been this decaying factor, or this degrading thought which cripples me. Why do I say this?
I can tell you why . . .
I say this because I have to.
I say this because I will fail myself if I don’t.
I say this to stop the rotten factors which destroy or degrade my value, and worse, I expose my demons to the light so that the darkness in my thoughts will never beat me again.
I always wished that I was beautiful.
I want to be beautiful.
(To you)
I want to be seen this way because the reflection in your eyes is moving to me, and quite possibly, perhaps you are partly the secret of my endurance—or perhaps, because of you, I can see something possible.
Now, as for my truth or the exposure of something unfortunate, I exposed my plans to which, as someone who acted as a responder and as someone who acted as a specialist and answered prevention phone calls, I expose this because asking if there’s a plan is important.
I never openly exposed my plan like this because in my head, if I exposed this, then I would lose it, and if I lost this, then I would never be able to execute my plan or in my ideas, I would never be able to set myself free.
But freedom is an interesting word too.
I had this idea of taking this train ride from my side of the country and heading out west. The tour is scenic. I would go from one sea to the other.
I would start out from New York City and end up, hopefully in San Francisco.
I would see the sights of my Country, which I capitalize with dignity. I planned to write my way, from the east to the west and detail what I saw, as if this would be a form of my last will and testament.
I would leave nothing behind. Mainly because I have nothing much to leave as far as money or anything that is substantially worthy—besides, myself, of course. However, this would be my final note.
My plan was to start here and end there. Maybe I would have a nice dinner. Maybe I would see the sights in good old San Fran, and maybe I would give myself a night out before I said goodbye.
I understand this is daring to admit. However, I continue anyway.
I have to say that I am not in crisis. I am not looking for sympathy. And no, this is not what I am looking to do now.
Besides, this is like a wish when blowing out the candles. You can’t tell anyone, otherwise the wish won’t come true, right?
This is why I always asked people to expose their plan because, somehow, this takes it away.
Understand?
More importantly, I am exposing this as a means to allow you to see that people think things.
Not everything we think is good.
But life is not all bad either.
Thoughts are thoughts. Ideas are ideas.
And failures?
Well, failures are the key factors to our restoration.
Am I restored?
No, son.
Not by a longshot.
No.
But I get up.
I show up.
I might not be at my best and yes, I make mistakes.
I do things I wish that I hadn’t done.
I say things I wish that I never said.
And sure. I have failed.
But I’m here still.
Aren’t I?
I never left you.
I never gave up on you (or us) despite what I may have said or thought.
Do you know how many times I wanted to throw away my journals?
Do you have any idea how many times I wanted to break my computer and toss it all away?
Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read rejection letters or heard from critics, or that I’ve been told—you’re just not that good, kid.
I’ve been told I’m terrible before.
I’ve been told worse too.
I’ve been lied about. I’ve been accused. I’ve been condemned to hell and yes, I have enemies, and some (or at least one of them) is probably reading this right now . . .
And so?
What do you do?
What can I do?
Get up and keep going.
I have been called and accused of awful things.
Did I deserve this?
Maybe.
I suppose someone thinks so.
Have I been exposed?
Absolutely.
Am I a fool.
Sure. Sometimes. . .
Have I been shamed?
Yes, I have been.
Have I failed?
You bet I have.
I have failed and in the worst ways possible too.
Am I so different from anyone else then?
I have never come out here to claim that I am good or better than anyone else.
This place is sacred to me.
Therefore, I have no time for lies here.
As people, we often lose our way.
We forget ourselves or we lose our purpose and thus, we tend to forget to see the point in all of this. We tend to forget that we do have a place in this world and without us, there would be nothing but an absent void.
I am about to go to the gym.
Do you know what they suggest when lifting weights?
They say go until failure.
Keep lifting until you can’t lift anymore.
Start your set and keep curling or pushing until your muscles fail.
You didn’t quit though. . .
You kept going until failure.
Keep going until failure and then stop and then go at it again — go until failure, or until your body can’t lift anymore.
This is how we grow.
This is how we become bigger.
Better yet, this is how we get stronger.
Keep going until failure.
Keep working.
Keep lifting.
If today doesn’t work out as well, okay.
Then take yourself to bed, get some sleep, and let’s go at it again tomorrow.
It has been said that I would rather listen to your problems than have to sit down and listen to your eulogy.
I would rather hear about your story than find out after, when it was too late.
I would rather hear and listen and talk than never have the chance to tell you, what the fuck?
I was your friend, you asshole.
How the fuck could you leave me like this?
I will never reveal you.
I will never tell what you say.
But I will always hold you close.
See, how I told you about my train ride?
I gave that away because talking about it is the only way to alleviate the pain.
And pain?
Pain can hurt.
But you and I, we have been through worse.
Plus, we can go until failure, together, if you’d like.
I’ll save you
You can save me . . .
Who knows what we can build?
But right now, I think that all we need to do is build some distance from yesterday,
We can start here, until one day, we can hardly see the past in the rearview mirror.
Keep going until failure.
That doesn’t mean we failed.
This just means that we’re looking to grow.
You get it?
I hope so . . .
Be at the gym in 15 minutes.
We have some work to do.
The Written Addiction 