There comes a time when the excuses have to stop.
All of what we’ve done and what we’ve been through and, of course, all that we survived and endured have become part of our past as well as part of our life.
This is our seasoning.
Right?
This is what makes us who we are. Or, maybe not.
Maybe what makes us who we are isn’t about where we’ve come from. But more, this is about how we’ve overcome. Who we are is about how we’ve adapted, despite the challenges. Or more than anything else, who we are is not where we come but how we’ve faced our life and how we decided to make a change, whenever or wherever possible.
We have lived. We have seen. We have tested the waters and tried new things. We have allowed time to pass. We have moments where we paused when, in fact, we knew that we should have done something. We knew that we should have tried or moved or done anything differently from, say, looking on as if to be a witness in life, or acting like a bystander, just watching life happen. We knew we should have acted but no. We paused. We failed to launch. We reacted to fear and stood by and watched as life happened instead of taking charge, or leading the way, or being the active participant in the life we always wished for.
There comes a time when good enough is not good enough. Not anymore. We want more yet we often find ourselves in the traps of old connections to old thoughts. This is when we see ourselves and recognize that this is what it means to be stuck. This is what happens when we are caught in the webs of old memories that no longer serve us or have a practical use.
This has to be gone. This has to be removed.
Call this what you will. Say this in whichever way you choose, but this is what it’s like to be spun in the webs of an old, unhelpful life.
This has to change. Better yet, we have to change this.
More importantly, I have to change this.
Otherwise, at best, I can only prepare for more of the same.
But in any case –
How long has it been?
How long has it been since you felt alive?
And I mean really alive, as in, “on fire,” or to be clear, how long has it been since you felt unstoppable?
When was the last time you felt like you were on top of the world?
When was the last time you felt young and wild or crazy?
Do you remember?
Do you recall what this was like?
Ah, to be young, or to be like we were back when it was safe enough to not care about things, like, sleep or getting to work on time, or how about the days before we knew about things like paying bills. What about life when rent was simple and what about life before we knew about a mortgage?
Do you remember?
Do you remember when you felt most alive?
Do you remember where you were?
Better yet, do you remember who you were?
If you say no or never, then the question I have for you now is what are you waiting for?
In fairness, and as an extension of my truth, and more than anything; I pose this to you, as a special holder of my secrets. Therefore, I admit to the mix between the two points.
I remember both the unfairness and the unhappy and more, my answer is yes. I do remember what it felt like to be alive.
And I mean really alive.
I openly disclose that there are times when I do what I want to do.
However, and most times, I do what I have to do.
I say this often. But I have to admit that I do not claim this line as my own.
No, I have heard this said to me before by other people.
I have heard this in a movie too. This is when a man named Cicero was asked by Maximus, in the Fild Gladiator:
“Do you find it hard to do your duty?”
Cicero answered with a tough but humble regard.
“Sometimes, I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.”
I can appreciate this.
However, there comes a time when our intentions and priorities come to a moment of awareness.
We cannot accept second place or second best.
We come to a point where there is no other choice but to draw a line in the sand.
This is our starting point. This is where we springboard from and jump into the rest of our life.
Perhaps, this is a crossroads or a moment of clarity. Either way, whether this is a moment of awareness or a spiritual awakening, as if to find ourselves at a pivotal moment, crucial, or course, and critical to the survival of our happiness; there comes a time when we reach a moment of realization. This is when our eyes open. We see our lives as clear as the sky and we view ourselves through an honest inventory which is no longer deniable.
Nothing matters, at least not the way that we assumed.
We conclude that time is moving. We are not searching as much as we are witnessing, which is the same thing as existing but not living. And so, we know we have to change.
We have to redirect ourselves or move differently. Otherwise, there is nothing left but more of the same.
There comes a time when the understanding that life is happening and standing by as a witness or as a bystander, we realize that we are not the movement that makes the motion in our life.
But oppositely, we are like the causal casualties of life in a stagnant nature. Life and the world is moving. But we are stuck.
There is no movement. There is no passion. There are no victories or moments of glory. There can be no love this way, nor romance. While guarded and safe, and protected by not choosing, or while settled into the softness of wasted mediocrity, our eyes can see what we failed to see before.
We recognize all of the red lights and the warning signs. We see each of the times when we allowed our lives to become subordinate or codependent and thus, we link this to the realization that we failed. We paused. We voluntarily surrendered our life away. This was all due to fear or due to an attachment of inaccurate memories, lies, assumptions, and biases.
We allowed the life we wanted to slip through our fingers and looking back, of course, we wished we moved.
We wished we did something. We wished we dared or took the chance. But the chance is gone and the window closed.
Therefore, now is the time to wake up and realize. Now is the time to recognize how a stagnant life can only lead to a stagnant life. And maybe this is good enough, for some people.
But not for me.
No, my trick is more elaborate and hopefully explosive.
At what point is it enough for us to realize our dreams have always been with us.
At what point do we realize that our dreams have always been loyal to us?
But how loyal have we been to our dreams?
How loyal have we been to us or to the soul? Or when we speak about our life and the heart of our life, or when we think about our soul and the depths of our truths, what have we done?
Can we face our reflection in the mirror?
Did we do enough to say that “yes, I gave this everything I had!”
Can we say this?
I fought for this. I mastered my art and performed my craft with all that I have.
I lived. I loved. I laughed and I learned.
I failed though. I missed my window because I have paused or resigned to my fears.
I want to be clear. And I want to be more.
I want to be able to say, to hell with it!
I left nothing up to the judges or the scorekeepers.
I want to be able to say that I gave my heart, and I gave my blood, sweat, and I gave my tears to this life.
I want to be able to say that I left nothing unsaid. I left no stone unturned. But more, I want to be able to say that let nothing pass and I reached, I leapt, I grabbed and whenever possible, I rode the wave for as long as I possible could.
There comes a time when popularity and people-pleasing has come to pass. Our life is no longer subject to an outside, or an external approval.
There’s only the matter that time is running out and once more, another window of opportunity can close, if we allow it to.
There are talents and abilities which are literally unmatchable and certainly unmatched by anyone else. And this is us. No one can match us.
No one at all.
I am famous for saying that people may have the same dream as me.
But the real question is do that have the same drive to achieve it?
Does anyone see what I see?
Can anyone do what I do?
The answer is no.
No one can pull off my trick but me.
Besides, the trick wouldn’t be mine if someone else pulled it off.
I think the greatest trick we’ve ever pulled is the trick it takes to continue and endure.
I think that this is far more important than we realize.
I am not a young man, at least not anymore.
Not by any means. I was though.
I was young, once.
This was true, at some point.
I suppose it is safe to say that I was wildly young or inexcusably young and defiant too, or crazy like a madman, or perhaps it is also true that I was timid. I was out loud but hiding in my own way, as if to say that I was loud and “in your face” but secretly, I was frightened and hiding behind an untrue voice.
In all honesty, I was petrified.
I have always been petrified, yet I have always been eagerly hoping that somehow, something about me would be appealing, at last, or that I could be beautiful to at least someone.
I have been called a loser. I have been called a bum. I have been called a lair. I have been called undesirable, unlikable, ugly, worthless, and at times, I have behaved in ways that supported these predictions.
I have succumbed to my own thinking and my own worst fears. I have allowed myself to lose priority. I have allowed the external and outside opinions to weigh me down.
I have done this to the point where I was exhausted and truthfully useless.
I have allowed myself to remain stuck. But worse, I have held myself hostage to an idea, or a thought, and as a person with a past and as someone with endured and unresolved tensions, which have been healed and processed throughout the decades, I can see how I have lost myself to these symptoms.
I have lost my way to a bias and an assumption that I am nothing more but the worst predictions. I assumed that I am and would always be the sum of my fears.
I believed that I am incapable, or that I am inept or unable, or like the fears from my youth and the recollections from a young boy who was bullied, or the fears which I have exposed in previous journals, regarding the pain and the humiliation of a young boy who was hurt or betrayed, or touched unfairly, and thus, as the remnant of someone who believed that I was discarded, or tainted and filthy, as if to be stained and removed from purity by the will of someone else (and for someone else’s unhealthy pleasure) I heartily accept that there are times when I fed into this.
I fed the illness of an unhealthy narrative.
I accept that I believed the lies about myself. I accept that I allowed people to dictate and determine who I am.
Yes, I believed the predictions that did not empower me. And yes, I look at the life that I left behind. I think about the times when I witnessed life, like a bystander, and I think about the times when I refused to dare or was too afraid to speak up.
I think about the times when I knew I should have gone left instead of right.
But I didn’t go.
I stayed –
Stuck!
What has this done for me?
What kind of life have I led?
Was I really loyal to me or my best interests?
Did the time come when I realized that either I get on the train and go elsewhere, or I dig my heels into the earth, and see to it that I live my life from here on in?
I’m not looking for that train to go elsewhere.
I’m not here to fulfill the predictions which do not empower me.
I have done things. I have accomplished things.
I have taken shots and missed. I have had to recreate myself and start over.
Yes, of course, i have.
I’ve had to do this more times than I can count.
But that’s okay.
I still have this. I still have my place, which is here with you, and this will always be with you—because despite the emotional landmines and the sorry quicksand that we find ourselves in when we are stuck in the murk—in the end, I want to live out loud.
And that’s only part of my trick.
As a matter of fact, there’s more.
Then again, no one knows more about this than you do.
No one knows more about me than you do.
At the same time, I have to clear the narrative.
I have to recreate myself, and as I stand here at the crossroads of a new turning point, I have to work on my trick before my time runs out.
It’s later than we think, remember?
There is no more time to pause or wait.
There is only time to move.
That’s all I know
and this is all I have
(with you).
The Written Addiction 