I have been working on my inner self for a long time. The me that existed even six months ago wouldn’t recognize the me that is flowering now. Yes, I’m still dealing with a great many things. I still grieve over my mother, and she passed more than two years ago (it will be three years in October). I still fight to see myself as worthy of love, to see my body as certainly needing work but still beautifully flawed and very human.
I still try to find people who want to like me, who want to love me, who want to take part in my own experiences, in my own life, and to share their own lives with me.
All of this is happening while I ride the ever changing tide of fortune and misfortune that I live out every day here in a country that truly does not give two shits about its poor citizens.
Still, even through these things, I have begun to change the nature of how I process information. I used to joke all of the time when I was younger that I had a built in CRC program (CRC is used in computing circles, it means cyclic redundancy check, and is meant to check for errors in data streams and tables to prevent corruption).
That CRC program is hard at work right now, it’s always at work, and it has found a large cache of corrupted data deep within my self-image. So even while my dad and I fight to make rent every month, to put food on the table, to pay the ever mounting piles of bills that never ever ever go away even when we cut cut cut deep, I’m still working on me! It’s exhausting, but I am upset that at 44 years old I still see myself as someone not worth loving, and I am FULLY AWARE that my time on this earth is limited, and so I am trying to recoup as much of that time as possible while also opening up possibilities for the future.
Not something easy to do when you’re poor, have very few resources, and an orientation and point of view most people who live around you would see as nothing short of perverted, evil, and scandalous! They don’t understand, so I deal with those emotional, economic, and social factors every single day, and it is exhausting. Did I say it’s exhausting? I think I did, but I’ll say it again because it is.
All of that in mind, I’m working to reverse how I see things. The quantum fluctuations of the universe that affect everything around me are spinning in the wrong direction, and by goddamn I’m working to reverse them. Is it possible? Dunno. Am I doing it anyway? I’m trying.
This isn’t so much about the power of positive thinking, as even positivity can be toxic in excess, but I am determined to stop letting this be the “bad place,” the “mirror universe,” the “alternate 1985.”
We all deserve better than this, and by god if I can do it I will. In the meantime, all I can do is continue to try and make my life better, to make the lives of people around me better, and do my damnedest to extend my reach as far as I can in order to take the hand of people who want to connect with me, and feel as if they can’t.
So much to do, not nearly as much time to do it in, but things must change. That’s not a hope. That is a life or death necessity.
.Red
