The Necessity of Expression

You know, I never really did like to write… It was tedious and I never found how to grasp satisfactions out of it; it seemed boring to write… Now, though, it’s a bit different… I may not be the best at finding the right words or imagining up a story and place well enough to describe it in detail, but I’ve grown an emotional tie to writing now. Writing has taken life in my through expression, the expression that is the most important thing for me.

It’s mostly fueled by hard times of mourning and frustrations, they are the things that open my eyes to life and give me chance to evaluate the things around me. I’m reminded today of this, on Veteran’s Day, after watching the specials on HBO… The feelings remind me of how I felt through my depression, yet… I sit here watching the impact on the soldiers of WW2 and it makes me feel incredibly guilty. These men, they have a reason for feeling that way. They were surrounded by horrors and death… That is not something I could go through… They were strong men, the ones who overcame those visions. I look up to them mostly in awe. Me, alone… I had a hard time dealing with my own insecurities and hard to cope with nature. I may have actually taken comfort in having to deal with those horrors had I been in those shoes… so much that it scares me; I don’t think I’d have the will to come out of something like that…

These are things that I have a hard time speaking… Just muttering them makes the feelings of condemning myself even worse, and they aren’t things I can express through my art. It’s relaxing to know I can get something like that out without it back-firing on me. Expression… It’s a powerful thing - it at least keeps me sane.

Anyways, I wanted to also say to all the veterans who have been through traumatic times and sacrificed their personal health for the whole of our country:

You are in my heart and I pray that, somehow through that, I can give you some strength to cope with those difficulties I know you must fight with daily. You give me strength and I hope knowing that is even a small comfort to know.

The Dichotomy of Pleasure and Pain on Life

Life changes every second of every day, yet a lot of times we do not consciously realize that. In my case, that is the general trend for even the more eventful changes. Often times my sub-conscious mind does not communicate it's struggle with it to come to my attention and I am left reacting to those concerns without really realizing it.

I'd like to think that it really isn't that odd, and know that I am not the only one who struggles with this problem. For me, it comes down to whether I truly want to know what goes on in my mind or not, and I know often life seems simpler not comprehending what is churning in those ever winding chambers. I came across a quote in my Dictionary of Thoughts which I feel explains this dilemma.

"Pleasure and pain, beauty and deformity, good and ill, seemed to me everywhere interwoven; and one with another made a pretty mixture, agreeable enough in the main. 'Twas the same, I fancied, as in some of those rich stuffs where the flowers and the ground were oddly put together, with such irregular work and contrary colors, as looked ill in the pattern, but natural and well in the piece. "

-Shaftesbury

Since I was in the first grade, after my first move from my birthplace Omaha, I began to truly learn that life is never all good or all bad at given times though I never really lingered on the thought - I was more concerned with trying to understand how I belonged to where I was then. I had pushed it aside, and let my mind glaze over the topic. I think I understood it internally at a young age, though that is hard to confirm because I never realized my decisions and views of the world around me were based off it. It contributed to my image of 'matureness' that I highly valued. I never brought the thought forward though...

As I've gone through college and encountered more complex scenarios and realized I suffered greatly at understanding myself, that revelation came more active to myself and I slowly began to understand why I react certain ways. I also began to realize that though I understood the concept that there is always good and bad mixed regularly in each situation, they still affected my emotions haphazardly and that I had been dismissing that since my second move to Florida when I had to try to find my place once again in a foreign place amongst an 'alien' populace. It got lost somewhere and I gave up in a sense... It didn't seem like there was anything I could do about it and subsequently let myself go on autopilot. To me it was nature, and nature was unavoidable.

I still know it is natural for there to be good and bad in every possible thing in life, but I've been shown a glimpse that it doesn't have to be the hopeless situation I thought it was - it could be beautiful too if you looked at it as a whole and not the overwhelming pieces scattered. More pleasure entered my life at that thought... I also became more desperate to find my place, to really find my place instead of just slipping in cracks in between those in my general area... As John Foster puts it, I was living my everyday life in false pleasure, too afraid of the initial pain to let myself live in true pleasure.

"All pleasure must be bought at the price of pain. -The difference between false and true pleasure is this: for the true, the price is paid before you enjoy it; for the false, after you enjoy it."

- John Foster

However, I can not say I completely agree with that quote. (I do feel the order in which you experience the pain and pleasure of a situation affects the overall memory of it in some ways though.) In essence, I take it as you have to be able to sacrifice the comforting 'normal' in life to experience the likely 'change' that can bring about true pleasure. I was robbing myself of that out of fear.

So now... I'm trying to live my life in pursuit of genuine happiness, and finding myself blinded by all the uncertainties. Hahaha! Life is definitely simpler seen through screened eyes and can be glaringly more appealing on the surface than one with ambitious desire for more in life, but it doesn't seem like living to me. Ironically, it's the dichotomy of pleasure and pain for me...