I can read some things in most people, their current emotions, sometimes if their being truthful or lying, basic things anyone who pays attention can see. But I don't know why people behave as they do, or think and feel as they do. I don't even understand much about myself, so certainly I can't see inside others, understand others, know what drives the behavior of others. What I do know about me is I was miserable, and somewhat sickly as a young child. I was terribly lonely, sad and depressed as I approached and entered my teens. So depressed that I was willing to pay the ultimate price to escape, a permanent solution to a temporary problem. As I approached adulthood, something inside me changed. While I don't think I will ever fear Death, other than how my death would effect others, I now no longer desire the permanent solution. I want life, and all the experiences that life brings.
Others have had similar experiences in their own way. The details for each of us are very different. The timing, the ages of our experiences may vary greatly. The impact of our varying experiences that enter our mind, shred our insides, create emptiness within our soul come to us in different ways and from different places. It could be bullies making daily life painful or unbearably embarrassing, neglect or rejection from someone we love or thought we loved, an illness or an impairment suffered from birth or from an injury, or any of a million different possibilities. And we all know that no one else understands. We stand alone, and suffer.
But the sadness, the depression, the loneliness and emptiness, the deep gnawing pain deep within those of us who suffer so, is probably very similar in each of us.
How each of us responds varies as greatly as the source of the pains. Do we hide within our self, not letting anyone in? Hide within our house, afraid to go out and live least the source of our pain find us and torture us? Do we eat ourselves into deeper problems, or drink ourselves into oblivion only to find life even worse when our foggy head clears? Do we lash out in anger, with insulting words or maybe even violence. Is the pain so bad that even one more day is too much, and crave that ultimate, and permanent solution?
Only each of us, individually, within ourselves, can know the pain. For me, somewhere along the way, I survived the worst days. Life did get better. Things will never be perfect, but life never is. I'm not sure why, but I do now want to live, despite the lingering pain. Since each of us is different, I can't tell anyone else how to survive, to make it past the pain, or how to live with the pain. What I can do, as I have tried to do in this story, is tell a little about myself. A bit about what caused of my pain, some events that caused my thoughts, some decisions I reached both bad and eventually good.
Since I have made my decision to live, even the worst days are not so bad. If others try to cause me pain, I look at it as their problem. What they do, what they think, is their problem. I let it blow over me like wind over a reed. I may still feel the pain, but it comes, passes through me and goes away, leaving me stronger. I'm strong as a great and mighty oak when I need to be, and soft and yielding as a reed when vile storms flung by the evil hearts of the world attack me or misadventures of life as they come toward me in the storms of life.
Telling this story has helped me tremendously in surviving. Much of what I have written never made it into this story, especially the early writing, when the pain was growing, becoming unbearable. For me, writing was a way to get the pain out. Like my morning run, like having a furry head to shed tears on, writing was a release. It gave me the time I needed to experience more of life. It gave me a way to take some of my pain and put it somewhere. It gave me a place and a means to think. Writing gave me life. And, if in the reading of this, I can help even one person to live through the pain, to find life at the end of a long and dreary tunnel of pain, my writing is also a great honor.
I hope to continue writing every day of my life. And as I think I may have created something of worth, I may even share some of it with others. But, even if no one else ever sees another word I place on paper, it is still life for me.
This book that is my life is a work in progress. I won't know how it ends until the end. So, here is to celebration of life until it's distant end, many chapters from now.
I will continue writing about important topics and events in my life, so, there will be more chapters just as there is more to live.
I wish all of you who have been brave enough to read this the best, Live Long and Prosper (I believe I heard that somewhere before).
