What You Deserve

Leah Burke: Do you ever feel weird?
Simon Spier: Weird?
Leah Burke: Sometimes I feel like I’m always on the outside, there’s this invisible line that I have to cross to really be a part of everything and I just can’t ever cross it.
Simon Spier: Me too.
― From Love, Simon

So I saw Love, Simon last night, and though my Parabatai will argue I’m a crier, I wept through most of the movie like a baby. While it wasn’t a story about a lesbian, so much of Simon’s experience resonated with me. Really it got me thinking about all the stuff I missed out on and how the things his parents said to him, I needed to hear someone say to me. I didn’t really have that. My family was me and my dad. The only time we ever talked about my sexuality it was a footnote in a larger conversation. Which should be comforting in hindsight when really it always felt like I was held back just shy of truly living my life.

Emotional Forces

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
-Buddha

You must unlearn what you have learned.
-Yoda

So like many white-collar workers, we have to create a Development Plan, part of mine was raiding some soft skill training to fill empty time. The first course I took was on emotional intelligence. One of the parts that stuck with me is needing to balance emotional intelligence with intellect. WOW, this sounds boring. Are you still reading? Please still be reading, I promise there’s Star Wars talk ahead.

Anxiety and Forgiveness

I have learned, that the person I have to ask for forgiveness from the most is: myself. You must love yourself. You have to forgive yourself, everyday, whenever you remember a shortcoming, a flaw, you have to tell yourself “That’s just fine”. You have to forgive yourself so much, until you don’t even see those things anymore. Because that’s what love is like.
― C. JoyBell C.

So I missed reading. I’ve been writing so much that I’ve been abstaining from reading fiction out of fear of losing the voices of my characters. Then I had a brainwave to give nonfiction a shot and it’s been going great. I plugged my way through Ghostland by Colin Dickey. (Which is highly recommend, it’s a great wealth of history and thought-provoking topics.) This week I started Smoke Gets In Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty. I expected gallows humor, insider insight into the death industry, and the like. What I didn’t expect was for it to open a can of worms of introspection for me.