"you show your emotion, and silence speaks louder than words"

I’ve been pondering lately on the idea of giving advice. It seems to me, that advice is rarely well taken – and I know for a fact that this advice won’t be taken well at all – but it’s also hard to keep to yourself something that you know will help a person, even when you know that that person doesn’t want to be helped.

We go through our lives, and we make these mistakes, we have errors in judgement and we lack in compassion, our behaviour can be less than admirable – but at the time, we feel like we’re invincible and we’re correct and we have every right in the world to be acting the way that we’re acting. It isn’t until later, sometimes years later, that we realise that we were horribly wrong. And then to see someone you love go down the same path, is not a pleasant experience. But at the same time, I think you need to look back at who you were when you made those mistakes – and whether or not you would have given a grain of salt to any advice you might have heard back then. I think you’d find that the answer is something along the lines of  “absolutely not.”

At the end of the day, your life, and the way you live it, is up to nobody but you. You will make your mistakes and you will regret them. You will wish for time that you will never get back. You will learn. You will grow. But you will do it all alone.

I’ve been thinking back over these past twelve months, and it astonishes me. I’m looking and examining everything that’s happened, and half of it feels like it was a lifetime ago, while the other half feels like maybe it wasn’t even real. Maybe it didn’t even happen.

If I’m being honest, I don’t necessarily like who I become for awhile there. I don’t like the things that I said, I don’t like the things that I did.  But I’m starting to see that maybe it was necessary for me to be like that, because now I’ve finally seen that that is not who I am.

I find it hard to let people go. I’m overly forgiving. It’s like when something bad happens, I’m so scared of losing the person who did it, that I say, “Oh, no, it’s okay. I forgive you.” When it’s not, and I don’t. I’ve finally learnt that while forgiveness has it’s place, some things you just cannot fight for. And I fought. I truly did. I fought every second of every day to make it work, to make something within me change so that things could just go back to the way they were. But they can’t, and they never will. It doesn’t mean that this person is forsaken, that we can never see each other, or never be friends, it’s just that I’ve finally learnt that I need to stop forgiving them, and start forgiving myself. Because I cannot keep blaming every single thing that happens on me. I was not at fault this time.

There have been so many life changing experiences. Some fabulous, some that I would not wish to go through again. There have been a lot of goodbyes, and sometimes it seems like along the way I lost the ability for hello. I’m an intensely private person – I keep these things inside, because I feel like if I let them out, then people will have them, and people will have a part of me, a part that they’ll be able to use like a looking glass, to see what it is that makes me tick. But I’ve learnt that I need to stop hiding from that.

I wanna believe in it all again, you know? I want to run barefoot and bask in the sun and believe in the beauty of the world. I want to hear these songs that I love, and know, without a shadow of doubt in my mind that this music is all it will take to heal me – because music is all it’s ever taken. I want to feel so inspired that I run and I draw and I paint even though I have absolutely no artistic ability whatsoever. I want to believe that I’ve made the right choices, and that I’m on the right path. I want to believe there is time to fix the mistakes I’ve made. And I wanna believe in you, every single one of you. I want to believe in a persons infinite ability to love and trust and heal. But when so much of that is taken away, where do you go from there?

But I can say with certainty that everything that has happened is worth it, because it’s led me here to this moment. I thoroughly believe it is. I have found a friend – someone I’ve known for years, but it’s only been in the last 18 months that I’ve realised I cannot live without this person. Do you have one friend, where everything is simple, and calm, and beautiful, and safe? One friend that you trust above anything else in the world. One friend who you are just as comfortable crying with as you are laughing. I do. By some miracle, I have been given a little slither of peace, and light. A beauty and a kindness that is worth believing in. And if giving up all this pain means giving up that one friend – I will take the pain. All of it.

So thank you.

I long for the freedom of open hills. Rolling onwards, un-judging, unmoving, permanent and solid.  The dark expanse of road stretching before me, this road that has held a million stories, seen laughter and tears and tragedy. I long to see the sun dancing it’s intricate dance between the trees, flickering, golden and warm. The blue of the never ending sky.
The muted hum of the music that you love playing from the speakers, filling every inch of your car but more importantly your heart, and your body, doing to your soul what the sun will do to your body – warming.  The happy freedom of laughter – whether or not the joke is funny, the long happy peal of release that comes with laughing with or at those that you love. I long for the sun-kissed moment of 5pm where you’re still roaring along a road somewhere, headed to the place that you desperately want to be – and I long for the peace that you feel in that moment. Where everything in the world is forgiveable, nothing is unconquerable, and the world is your oyster.

Regret is like a thief in the night. It comes upon you when you least expect it, sneaks up and steals your breath. Sometimes this regret is for something stupid that you’ve done, that at the time seems like the pain will last a lifetime, but a month later is just a thing of the past. Sometimes the regret is deeper, like when you let down a friend. Or when you let down yourself.

It’s easy to let this regret consume you. Make you question every single thing that you do. We instill fear in ourselves, that if we do this, it may hurt someone, it may hurt us. We become so afraid of the possibility, the possibility of the disappointment that can come with regret, that we train ourselves to believe that it’s not worth it to try. Yet, more often than not, regret comes not from the things that you do, but the opportunities you leave behind.

Quite often it’s our heart that cops the brunt of this pain. Is it fair? Is it fair to regret the boy who broke our hearts so deeply, that we end up regretting the boy we didn’t let ourselves love because of that other boy? But which will be worse, in the long run? If you get hurt, you will regret the actions that caused you to feel that pain – but is that really worse than, fifty years down the track, regretting that you never felt the love that come before that pain. It’s a double edged sword.

It’s easy to say “No regrets”. To only look to the future. It’s easy to say, but damn near impossible to do. The past makes us who we are, and the future has no merit without the lessons that we’ve learnt. So many people bury the mistakes in their past, try to compensate by making the right decisions in the future. But I think regret is inescapable. It’s how we learn right from wrong. It’s something that needs to be honoured, and accepted, and felt, so that in the future, we do not fall into the same traps that we fell into in our youth.

There is time to fix the mistakes that you have made.

Snippets of old pieces of writing from an old blog.

ICE QUEEN

“You see the same people every day.
Insecure girls with a novacaine high hiding behind black charcoal and anger. But you know they paint their toenails the same red as their lips.
The hypocritical mothers fighting for a better tomorrow using the same sad excuses their parents used. It doesn’t make anymore sense to them than wishing on a purple star while following the techni-non-colour rainbow to never never land.
Ever wondered why it’s called that. Never never land. Seems ironic. Almost like an omen.
Freedom comes with a price but it’s one you can’t pay.
Does that mean it’s a price too valuable to pay.
Or does it just mean it’s a price you can’t comprehend.
Like dancing with the pixies and weaving webs of lies. You’ll never know until you try.
I had those dreams again. The ones that make me wonder if i’m really asleep or just drifting. I hope it’s asleep. The idea of my concious mind having those thoughts scares me more than the dream itself.
At the same time it’s comfort. A crazy world inside my head seems safer than a crazy world outside it. Maybe I can control it. Maybe it’s there for me. Seems more likely it’s there because of me. Maybe that worlds who I am. Maybe that worlds what I hate. Maybe it’s what I want to be. Maybe all those things are the same.
Theres the Ice queen with her throne. Like the queen of hearts. Sept she cuts with her words instead of her sword. Seems to me thats the best way to make people bleed more.”

IN MY HEAD

“The elephants are dancing inside my head again.
This one elephant keeps tripping over the ties on her ballet slippers.
It’s better when they wear tap shoes
I find the beat  easier to follow.
I wish i had a pen and paper or a voice to speak these words
seems like i can only show them to you
a nameless face
maybe that makes me a hypocrite
maybe i’ve gotten really good at that wall
hiding behind a mask
being what people want me to be
i told you i was learning to play the game
but at what point does it stop being just a game?”

MORE THAN THIS

“A friend just told me we all have our moments.
My moments are seeming less and less – momentuos.
Like a pattern thats not a pattern.
Or a pattern you can’t follow.
One and the same.
It bugs me that people tell you the opposite of what they really want.
Honesty is a luxury we can’t afford.
Walls are cheaper to build up.
But your kidding yourself if you believe they’re hard to break down.
Maybe what bugs me more is that even though we tell people the opposite of what we want.
They do the opposite of what we tell them.
It’s a cracked up way of getting what we want.
Our faith is hidden in lies.
We expect the worse.
And then we act surprised when we get it.
It’s becoming a game.
I’m not ashamed to admit I’m learning how to play.
But I still believe theres more than this.”