debris

I was speaking with my mother a few days ago and I was telling her that she and dad brought us up to feel very optimistic and confident about the world. I internalized everything as terrifying though, and very early my sense of perfection coloured how I viewed my own efforts. I believe that only now do I feel the confidence that came from theorizing things, Life and experiences gave me a sense of the pessimism I expected. I see it in others too. I think it comes from a number of places. Internally from family experiences, but also from what you are listening to and reading at home and then hearing from people in and around your family, including Teachers and aquaintances. I think that the subtle self talk and ambient noise of the world can settle like silt at the bottom of your consciousness and get stirred up whenever another type of stress gets to you. It is a constant struggle. I have written here over the years of looking in on the lives of people I know and of strangers, observing the knowing smiles, the everyday normality of a hug, a good talk producing laughter, a parent lifting a child into the air, and wondering about the fragility I felt at being on the other side of that. I asked myself many times what was it about me that was leaving me feeling as though my world of happiness had been blown up and I was sitting in the debris. I was sitting in it. Most definately. My mind was sitting in it, trying to find the horizon that shone through it. I kept asking myself, when would I become friends with the only person I could not ignore? When would I just trust myself all of the time? When would things someone said off-handedly not wound me and leave me in a ball of pain? When would I take up those great moments of confidence as a permanent battle cry? Then, very, very slowly I saw myself as a person for real. I saw that I will have moments of doubt, of setback, of pain, of confusion...but it would not have to hang around me like a bad smell. It is life happening, and I am inside it and part of it and I am a shard of that energy and refraction and reflection and I am right where I need to be.