Feeling a little neurotic right now. Dancing on the edge of greatness?
They say there's a correlation between genius and insanity, right?
Sorry, I'll notch down my ego's voting rights in this conversation.
Just returned from a rendezvous with special friends. The peers I respect the most. The select few, out of the 100's I've met, that I truly think will change the world.
I had to pee so bad when I got home from the bar.
I rush to the alarm, "2576 off", I say, as I put the annoying beeping to sleep.
I'm processing our conversation from the bar. I shared a little about my burning desire to write. A desire that felt more profound after discussing it with this well read bunch.
I'm thinking about the trait of being neurotic right now, though. Wondering if I'm crazy. Wondering if I'm crazy enough to live the life I am meant to live.
It takes a brave heart to really step up to the plate in life, you know? Why do you think there are so many broken families and abandoned children? Running is easy. Stepping up though, you have to be a little bit of the right kind of crazy, I think. I wonder genetically and generationaly how my amount of crazy has evolved from my ancestors. I thank God I'm not a compete drone like everyone else. At least, if I can healthily maintain the right amount of crazy, and continue to steer my life into something meaningful, then yes, that is the unrealized life I thank God for. Yet I know full well the power of the modern day drone life strengthens. I have to maintain being healthily crazy.
I remember how my Mom told me about how her Mom's Mom was blind, and I wonder how that effected my Mom's Mom and my Mom, and now me. This blind woman I never met. I recall the story my Mom told me about her Mom being institutionalized when my Mom was a girl. I reflect on how neurotic my Mom can be, sometimes wondering if she has that same spirit in her that makes her a little bit seriously crazy. They do say my Mom is the one I get my writing from. hmm...
Good conversations with the homies tonight. The one who proclaimed, "writing in ones youth is absolute vanity", also blessed my desire to write, recognizing it as a gift. A true secret wish of my own, that my writing could be a gift and not just an excuse for me to pretend like my life has some sort of meaning. Although he may have just been too "nice" to tell me what he really thought. I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least that's what my hopeful spirit will do. If I wasn't able to take the positive support offered to me, then I would positively be unable to support the journey of writing this book. We need people, we need each other. That's one thing I've learned for sure.
The longer the conversation went on at the bar, the more my legs shook. Sure it was slightly cold, and sure I was slightly buzzed from my 2 pints, but I think it was mostly the presence of the fear of my desire being stirred about in the conversation. I was having a hard time containing myself.
I tried to play it cool, trying not to talk too loud or fast or... neurotic, like I can tend to do when I get excited about something.
I just keep telling myself, if the passions really right, it'll still be there tomorrow. You know?
My 5 respected friends unknowingly unanimously voted for me, though. For the journey of me attempting to write a book.
Maybe it was only spoken by 1, but I feel like they expressed the consciousness of our entire demographic. The entire worlds mid to late twenties generation, "who is writing about what I'm going through? About our experience?" one of them voiced.
Another adds, "I wasn't put in a concentration camp as a child, or have any type of radical upbringing. I was born in middle class America, and so my story doesn't matter, because my story isn't the type people read books about."
I mourn a little inside for my generation, for all of us middle class Americans who were cursed by being born in to "perfect" lives.
It's like saying, "Jesus was Jewish, and you're not, so he didn't die for you. You weren't born with the right ingredients."
It could be any young person anywhere in the world actually. That is the bigger theme I felt expressed. "I am a child in the eyes of the worlds wisdom, so what a fool I would have to be to try and share my life's story through a book." Hell, is could be anyone anywhere any age any place who feels like their story doesn't matter. Like they don't have remarkable tales to share.
How can our lives matter, if our stories don't? I wonder to myself.
The thought of it all breaks my heart quite honestly.
I see the reality of the connectedness of life so clearly. If my life matters, then everyone's life matters. If your life doesn't matter, then my life doesn't matter. This reasoning makes so much sense to me, that come to think of it, this if probably why the reality of suicide crushes my spirit so strongly. The collective hopelessness of the world is the most bone chilling reality my mind can muster to mourn. The millions of ways it can play out, all being summed up in the spit our ancestors unleashed on the savior. In Adam's bite of the apple. All of our stories are interwoven, not with the same appearances, but with similar processes. We all have our own hurdles and mountains one way or another.
If you think married people or wealthy people don't have struggles, you're an idiot. Yeah they look different, but does the kid being bullied have a worse struggle than the one whose parents are splitting up? It all matters.
If my life doesn't matter, then God sacrificed his son for nothing? Not only can I not swallow that, I can't live in a world that could consider to accept that.
That's why I have to write my book. A good majority of the world don't have seemingly evident & overtly obvious oppression, the middle class young adult American has no scars to bare, or movements to march in.
Or do we?
Did Jesus come to break us free of the seemingly evident? Or did he come to free us of the darkness in our hearts? Just because a movement lays below the surface, it doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. Far from it. In fact, it may be all that's matters.
And if you're prime to tell me it doesn't, then what the hell are we doing here?
