This is how life can be when we look or see ourselves as unworthy, or less-than.
I say this openly because I offer this as a means to expose how insecurity can destroy our ability to be happy.

Who doesn’t want to be happy?
Who doesn’t want to feel content?
Who wants the world on a string?
I do . . .
But first, let me expose a truth, or should I say my truths, which I hope to call relatable, and more, please allow me to illustrate how insecurity degrades us, and like a weed, insecurity starves the flowers of our hopes and truths.

I remember when there was a time when it was good to be wild.

Do you?

I remember a time when it was fine to risk everything and not care about what came next. And I swear, a World War could’ve taken place and I might not have noticed.
A storm could have passed, a hurricane, tornado, and even an earthquake, and all could have gone on simultaneously and I wouldn’t have noticed.

There is no point in denying the truth. There’s no reason to deny the inevitable and there is no reason to quit or surrender, at least not now.
I agree when you say life can be hard. I agree when I hear people say that life can be unfair.
And I agree when people shake their heads and maybe they spit or curse, and I understand the feelings that come with loss, or the loss you find when you work so hard for something to happen, but in the end, the outcome was not what we hoped for.

There are times when we go crazy.
But don’t worry.
I’ve been doing this for decades now.
I’m pretty good at this too.
But—

There’s a time when all is too confusing. And there are times when the truth comes out, which can be good or bad or painful, or not.
But in the end, there is a time when life is revealed—and there’s a time when deep down, I suppose there’s a piece of me (or us) that always knew. . . .
There’s a piece of me who knew that deep down, this was just a pipe dream, or that this was all a bag of fantasies, and in the end, the truth came out, and the blinders came off, and all the warning signs and all the red flags become so apparent that you ask yourself, “What the hell was I thinking?”

“Why did I go back?
or “Why didn’t I get away when I knew I had the chance?”

I suppose I was somewhere around the age of 18 or 19 when I started to realize that I had been lied to.
I had been stolen, in a sense, and corralled in another.
I was misled by own blindness and misguided by the inaccuracies of my environment and my peers and the poor assumptions of leadership in my so-called surroundings. I was taught by imperfect teachers and believed the lies of those who were fed the same lies before me.
It’s a torch, or a baton in some relay race and, yes, the word race fits well in this entry.

I am mindful of my own imperfections. I am mindful of my thoughts the trickery of my old beliefs. However, I am mindful that I have grown. Because I have grown, I have come to the understanding that the depth of my love can outweigh and reach further than the span of my hate.
At the same time, love and tolerance leads to vulnerability. Vulnerability allows for weakness. My hate used to despise these things. Then again, I used to despise everybody –
because I was taught to.

I never think much about the old days or the crazy ones that either degrade me as a person or that link me to an old stigma which says that since I was “this,” then I will never be anything but “that.”
I don’t like to think this way
(anymore).
I never think much about the dark places or the underground hideouts, or the broken-down buildings, condemned and lightless, but yet, the life of the people within them was darker than the worst of midnight and the souls who sunk down along the floors or nodded off in stages of synthetic bliss were equally as damned and as condemned as the buildings where they would hide.