if you are reading this 3/?
If you are reading this call your mom. Call your friends. Call the people you feel bad about not calling and don't trip all over yourself apologizing. Just say "hey, it's been a while, I miss you, let's fix that." Make time for people, for relationships, for shared experiences, for memory-making, for the opportunity to feel joyful, for the opportunity to battle life's challenges as a team and not just as an individual. If you are reading this forget about the thing that you think about when you want to feel bad. Yes, other people do it too. Yes, they do it for most of the same reasons you do. Yes, your big losses, failures, and fuckups come with valuable lessons and opportunities to grow, but all that shit happens internally. You don't have to will it to happen by revisiting every mistake you ever made and annotating every detail of every mistake you ever made so that you will never fuck up again. You just have to trust that it will happen, or that it has happened. We internalize so much bad stuff... what does it cost us to assume that our brains have taken in whatever there was to take in from any given experience (good or bad) and then told our bodies to piss out the rest? If you are reading this don't miss opportunities to tell people you love that you love them. I'm not talking about repetition. I'm not talking about saying something big so often that it gets diluted. I'm not even talking about actual talking. I'm talking about show don't tell. I'm talking about the little things you can do to show people that you actually see them. To be seen is to be loved. If you are reading this make apologies and amends. Yes, it's hard. No one wants to revisit the times they hurt someone else. No one wants to feel like they have the capacity for wickedness, for cruelty, but we all do. The mistakes I made that ended up hurting people were largely the byproduct of the way I grew up, but I am still responsible for what I do and for what I have done. And yes, some of the people I've tried to apologize and make amends to have been like, "yeah, no, fuck off." That's the cost of doing business. You can't change the past and you can't tell people how to feel. All you can do is try to reattach whatever part of them you cut off, and, if they're not open to it, you have to relent and leave them the hell alone because it's not about you. If you are reading this find a way to forgive the people who have trespassed against you. Yes, it's hard. A lot of people don't want to give up being aggrieved. I was one of them. A lot of people view forgiveness as excusing wickedness and cruelty, and, yes, sometimes that's what it comes down to. But, also, a lot of people's mistakes aren't about them as much as they're about circumstances, upbringing, and the programs that were installed on their mental and emotional hard drives before they had the capacity to be selective and judicious. Yes, sometimes you'll have to tell someone trying to make apologies and amends to fuck off and die because sometimes the broken bits are too broken. Still, you can't change the past. All you can do is try to live in the moment and do what feels right. I have personally learned and gained more from forgiveness than I ever learned or gained from holding grudges. If you are reading this don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. I don't know that tomorrow will be better than today, but I think there's a lot of power in knowing that it might be.
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