Pain Is Recycled As Gratitude

Did your country just get bombed? Did your parents just die? Did you just lose your job? Did you just get evicted? Did your car just get blown up out in a parking lot? Did your fiancée just cheat on you and then leave you, now treating you like you are a dirty, worthless disease? Did your partner just get in a fatal accident? Did you just lose a loved one after a long, slow, painful battle with a crippling disease? Are you having trouble coming up with enough money to pay only your rent, utilities and food? Did you just skip into your father’s room at age 8 only to find that “Daddy’s not waking up” because of a heart attack caused by a drug overdose…and then were forced into the foster care system to be looked after by someone you hate? Do you live in poverty and squalor, being harshly oppressed because of the gender you were born into? Have you ever been raped? Have you ever been ambushed, beat up, hospitalized and on top of that, wrongfully taken to court because you are a “dirty faggot”? Or worse, were you, at age 14, because of your sexuality, kidnapped by kids only a few years older than you, dragged out to a fencepost, beaten to a bloody pulp, and left for dead in the middle of Wyoming, wondering when your last breath may come…until it finally did?

We all complain a lot about where our lives are. We bitch that the apartment next to us does laundry at 10:30 at night and keeps us awake. We yell at our roommates for stopping our laundry while we’re gone, thus leaving our clothes soaked for hours. We look in the mirror and berate ourselves for our perceived physical imperfections. “I’m too fat; pregnant women shouldn’t be THIS fat” or “I have crooked teeth, and everyone will think I’m ugly if I show them when I smile” or “Really, God? AMPLE back hair?? You just felt like you should dole that out to a gay man living in this day in age?? Real cool, God, reeeeeal cool….” Insert your imperfections here.

We don’t stop and see that back hair and wet clothes aren’t travesties of the universe. They’re facts of life. They’re perceived pain. We don’t stop and take a breath, and take a look at the lives of those around us. We yell at our roommates without any thought to what his day may have been like. Did his mom just get killed? Did he just lose his job? Did he just get raped? We don’t know, and the key is because WE DON’T ASK. But how can we ask if we don’t even stop for even one second to think to ask?

I am grateful for those who love me. I am grateful for slow songs and easy driving in the cool night air. I am grateful for calm silence and the time it affords for introspection. I am grateful for my spirit and my ability to touch it, even when I’ve avoided it for some time. And I think I am most grateful for those who choose to forgive me. It takes a big person to forgive me, because I don’t usually forgive others, and I don’t always accept forgiveness. I know that it’s very difficult for me to forgive someone who I think should be forgiving me, and be clean about it. So I hereby give immense props to those who forgive me, especially when I’m being stubborn and not seeing the high road in it all. I’m immature and I speak many times before I think about the big picture. For the next little bit of my life, I’m going to be very immature, so please bear with me.

I was never a child. I turned from a happy, loving, abundant, powerful, vulnerable, free toddler to a scared, tense, paranoid, jaded, angry victim of a 5-year-old. I’ve finally once again experienced how it feels to really feel free, and I love it. And it’s time for me to push that 5-year-old through to align myself with the 23-year-old I am in this reality. So please bear with me as I grow my 5-year-old up during the next few months or years…it will be a journey.

Here’s a hats-off to everyone who has gone through the things in the first paragraph. I personally know at least one person for 9 of those 13 questions, and they are true survivors.

Here’s to envisioning and realizing a future where we aren’t living lives filled with hatred, despair, pain and war…

-Ryan