A Balancing Act

Part of my struggle has always been balance, as I suspect is true of most people. Balancing my time, my responsibilities, my relationships. It all begins to feel so fragile as I delicately divide my attention in a way that I hope to be fair and equal, but ultimately is never enough. I have not yet learned in my twenty five years how to separate myself into each significant section of life without dissolving completely. I have not yet learned how to give up pieces of who I am without creating holes in my heart that can never again be filled. I have not yet learned how to let go without falling.

Yes, sometimes the fall is beautiful and elegant and necessary. Often it brings with it new wisdom and understanding and lessons that could not otherwise be learned. But mostly it still hurts when I inevitably hit the ground. The cold, hard smack of the pavement of reality continues to leave bruises, which only deepen and widen with each new fall. Mostly it becomes more and more difficult to find the strength to get up again. It becomes more and more difficult to allow myself to let go.

And so I concentrate on what I can control, on school and work and the small daily choices that are of no real consequence. I choose to smile and laugh and play the role I have created for myself. I choose to portray the person that I think the world wants me to be, and while this is often beneficial, it is not without cost. I have not yet learned how to balance who I am with who I want to be seen as, and I worry that the imbalance has meant sacrificing aspects of myself that I should have been more unwilling to part with.

Namely, writing as truthfully as I want to, as I am capable of. I find myself becoming so increasingly wrapped up in the "supposed to" of writing that I've lost what it is I love about it. I used to be so honest here. More than that, I used to discover honesty here, as though the truths I was unwilling to admit to myself would manifest on the screen without my assistance. I was writing the words, but I was reading the content. I was, and continue to be, an outsider looking into the depths of my own existence.

And I liked that other people could see that too. I liked that people could open to this page and see me, hear me, understand me. But then, more difficult truths emerged and suddenly the availability of this blog to the rest of the world became a terrifying thing. It became more real than I was prepared to accept. It became a balancing act between what I would say and what I really wanted to say, what I claimed to feel and what I actually felt. It became a balancing act between not hurting other people and hurting myself. And so I chose not to risk offending anyone and consequently gave up the one thing in my life that allowed me to be as authentic as I needed to be.

So I didn't write here when I really wanted to, needed to. I stopped myself from revealing those dark, unpleasant emotions to the world because it stopped me from having to see, to read, to believe they were legitimate. But they were. They are. And the truth is, this latest fall has shown me, for the first time in my life, that I can't really worry about what people find here. How you react to my words on this page is a reflection of you more than it is of me. I cannot spend my life apologizing for who I am. It's not fair to any of us.

I was recently accused of hiding my genuine feelings behind the mask of melodramatic prose, and in that moment, hurtful as it was, I understood that it is fairly easy to misinterpret my writing. My feelings are never more genuine than when they are on the page. I am not hiding behind prose. I am prose. I am a living, breathing poem, as each of us are. I write directly from my heart, not from my head. After all, it is my head that tells me I have to balance. It is my head that stops me from writing the words that are aching to be released inside my heart. It is my head that keeps me from this blog.

But my heart is here. My heart is in every word I have ever written. I end every journal with the same line. "This is it. This is me." Nothing has ever been as true.

I will write what I have not yet had the courage to write. If you read it and feel offended or angry or sad or guilty or a combination of those dark, unpleasant emotions we would all rather not see, or read, or believe, than perhaps you too will understand, finally, what it means to be honest. It is letting go. It is being an outsider looking into the depths of your own existence. It is finding the fortitude to get up again, to fall, to greet the cold, hard pavement of reality as it hits you, to reflect on the bruises, to share them with the world, to write about it, and if you're strong enough, to begin to heal. This is where it begins. This is it. This is me.