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To Keep Things In Perspective

I had a chat with a friend whose sister survived the unthinkable. She talked about the power of words and what they mean. Somehow, my struggles are very small in comparison to others.
I have been trying to figure out what it means to be tough for as long as I can remember. Sometimes life happens and causes me to redefine my terms.


I found a prose I wrote for a young girl. Her name is Olivia. She was 13 when we met. She was diagnosed with stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
Everyone told Olivia how strong she was.
“You’re doing so well,” they told her.
“You’re so strong,” they said.
Pretty sure Olivia would have rather been less strong and healthier than sick and enduring. She went through chemo. She endured the treatments.

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To Be Free

I can’t say where this began. Somehow, politics have become the new religion.
I see people that were once friends or even family are now on polar opposites of the world to each other.
They’re enemies now.
We’ve become a “Who did you vote for,” community and a “What God do you pray to,” society.
We treat symptoms but not the roots. We argue. We debate. We claim our flag in whichever condition it’s in and then we argue some more but to what avail?
Who benefits?
Or more importantly, who suffers?

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They Say It Takes A Village

I heard a speech a long time ago. I heard, “It takes a village to raise a child,” but I sometimes wonder where the village is or do they even care.
I see them like this.
They’re just kids or more like babies. They’re just guppies in a little pond that will grow bigger in deeper and more dangerous too.
But while they’re young, the kids hide behind their protection. They’re safe because they’re at least somewhat protected by laws and parents or the revelation that the world is an unkind place and becomes more unkindly if we feed the wrong systems.
Dammed kids.
They’re too young to be taken in by the cops. They’re too small to do what they do, but yet, the people they play with are too big to play childish games. It’s a powder keg for sure. But that’s the game. That’s the thrill; and the fact that the entire world could detonate at anytime is the rush makes sense of our crazy, young, teenage angst.

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Empowerment

What does it mean to live? Think about this. It’s really a simple question. The answer should be equally simple too. What does the word “Live” mean? What else could it mean other than to have a life, to be alive, or adversely, to not be dead.
But what does it mean to die? It has been argued by me on several occasions that we die in many ways. We experience death while living alive—and some people live lifelessly, always following, always wishing they were someone, somewhere, or someplace else. What kind of life is that?

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Just A Story: Sad But True

The news came and I could not move. Time took on a strange appeal. I was frozen somehow, moving in slow motion, but yet, time was quickly ticking away from me.
I was young at the time. I was only 17 years-old but stunted in a way—like a child, or more accurately, I was stunned and child-like, almost like an infant’s pause before the pain strikes and the cry begins.
It was December and I was away in a place that was very foreign to me. I was on The Farm in lieu of jail, which would have been a sentence of one year, plus 90 days.
This meant I would have to serve close to one year in a place where I could neither physically nor mentally compete. I pulled a trick though. Or should I say my attorney pulled a trick. He landed me in a program called T.A.S.K. which was an acronym for something that helps young, first-time offenders with a youthful offender stipulation that would eventually falls from the records of past.

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Monday Morning Motivation on 5/13/19

This is what happens . . .
First, the accident or the incident, whichever the case may be, then comes the response, followed by the afterthought and the things we wished we said. Has this ever happen to you?
Ever have something occur and then you walk away wishing you said something else?
You wished you came out on top in a conversation, yet instead, you felt vulnerable or foolish, is if someone was able to pull a fast one right before your eyes—and you just stood there and let this happen.

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A Mother’s Day Thought

Today is Sunday May 12, 2019… Mother’s Day:

The rain has been falling all night. I know this because I was awake and listening to the teams of your raindrop armies falling on the roof of my house and scattering like a thousand foot soldiers that run away after landing from the sky.
It is morning now and light has come through the clouds but with no sunshine to greet the day.  Maybe this is right—the rain, I mean, and the slowness of the morning, the gray skies, and the quiet dreariness of a windless, rainy morning is fitting for now.

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For You

I wanted to explain this to you in a different way. My hope is this will bring you some comfort during the upcoming days,
I am writing this to you to bring a little understanding about depressive thinking and the unending cycle that comes with it.
I wanted to reach out to you specifically to explain a bit more about me so that maybe you will understand a bit more about you and the things you’ve faced in your past.
First and foremost, please allow me to officially explain that you are far from alone. There are millions of us out there, lost, unsure, uncomfortable, and unable to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Before going forward, please understand that I make no assumptions about you or your pain; however, I am offering this explanation to make sense of one of the most senseless kind of deaths known to man,

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