Are you afraid of the dark?

Getting ready for Oct. 24th spoken word poetry event. Here is another new poem;

When we were young,
How many of us cried out,
“Just wait until I’m older!”

Look, as the adults around nervously fidget in their seats as their minds raced to –
“Don’t wish this hell on yourself.”

Remember when Hide and Go seek was a game you played with friends?
Well now that I am older it has become a game I play with love.

Love doesn’t play fair. It’s like Red Rover, Red Rover
Except love clotheslines you.
Every. Single. Time.

Mom kissing my skinned knees when I fell
Became Mom trying to get me to stop hyperventilating
long enough for me to tell her
he doesn’t love me anymore.

When I was young,
it was the monsters under the bed that scared me.
No one warned me to be afraid of the monsters in my bed.
I didn’t realize monsters could look so much like men that I loved,
so much so that I started questioning love and not men.

We learned to grieve when our pets passed away,
but how little opportunity we had to learn to grieve when the love of our life chose to walk away.
“Hey, I can still see you over there.
Happy.
Without me.”

How we are so affected by the choices we make
and don’t make,
and how they control our lives.

Love scares me
You scare me
He scares me
She scares me

I guess you could really say
I scare me.

What a beautiful world we live in,
where we can face that fear head on
and come out a little bit more alive.

The Unstoppable Force meets the Immovable Object

I wrote this blog and filled it with selfies so you can see my new hair. So yeah, you get beauty and brains. You’re welcome 😉

“Sometimes life checkmates your king”

Fear and love depend on each other to define their nature. Both Fear and Love are a state of being. Just like being frozen in fear, sometimes we find ourselves frozen in love. So consumed with the state of being in love, even when we know damn good and well it’s not good for us. 

It is, simply put, the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. When they encounter each other, either the force is stopped or the object is moved. Which you might say “well that is compromise”, but one does not simply compromise their whole identity. 

I was the unstoppable force, and he was the immovable object. What we can find peace in, is that we were destined to meet. 

Oh and the people we meet and how they shape us. Whether I made you smile, served you a meal, bossed you around set, shot with you, caused you to laugh or cry, moved you with my words, held your hand, broke your heart, or our lips met for a brief moment in time… It was destiny. You didn’t choose to meet me, or I you. We didn’t choose this moment, this moment chose us. 

A million decisions lead you unknowingly to me and what a beautiful thing that is. 

Planting Weeds

   

Life is a garden; grow it. 

I stopped struggling with insecurities when I was around 15; the year I realized I was hot. By that I mean I came to an understanding that the only opinion of my level of attractiveness that mattered was the opinion that I held of myself. 

Even still, I walked into a relationship whose key player danced on the human weakness of feeling as if you are not enough. I would lay awake at night thinking that I needed to change my body or my habits to be enough for this person. 

It felt like an insane uphill battle because my well founded self confidence in who I was fought with this projected insecurity of who I felt I needed to be.  

  
  
Insecurities are like the weeds of life. Bad people are the pests. Unhealthy thoughts like having bad soil. 

I’ve never seen someone plant weeds, but that is exactly what I had done. 

A moment of enlightenment brought to you by: unconditional love.   

After that relationship withered away, I found myself laying in the arms of the man who told me he loved me so much that when I was away he even missed my stinky feet. Yet even in the arms of someone who loved me so fully, I found myself struggling with the ghost of those insecurities I had never come to know, and this sudden hollow need to feel like I was somehow enough. 
  
The result of unaddressed emotions lead me to become both bitter and needy.  

  

I expressed to my best friend during this exploration of self awareness, “This must be hurt pride causing a bitter root to take hold.” and she had given me three weeks to bitch, whine, and be resentful, and then assured me I had to get my shit together. 
  
Once my allotted timeframe came to an end, I worked to uproot the bitterness. I imagine visually it’s a lot like weeding a garden, where you grab the weed by the base pulling hard, trying to ensure you get all of the roots out of the soil so that it doesn’t take hold again later. I turned my love off, and it had been affecting all my relationships. 

  
The weeds sprung up ever so often, and I become more equipped each passing day to handle them. There would be a season where it came time to plant a new garden. However, I discovered that though free of weeds, my plot of land had bad soil. *Coming out of the metaphor, I never addressed the needy feeling taking its toll.   

If love is like sunshine, then pain must be the rain.

This has brought me through another growing season: You do not need either person to be enough. 

  
The sun and the rain do not dictate to the flower to grow, bloom, and be a flower. You do not need either the insecure or loving person projecting their perspective of who you are and what you are worth on you. 

The rain does not arrange a downpour on your schedule, and the sun does not shine at your command. You will never be enough for the wrong person, and there is nothing about you that would keep away the right person.

  
  
You are enough. 

Be a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday. This change in yourself is happening every day because of the love in your life from family and friends, but strongly because even when it seems like you fail, you spring back up. You are not a victim of others actions. You are strong, loving, hard working, attractive inside and out, and intelligent; all of this makes you beautiful. 
  
Say it every day, with conviction “I am enough.”