Being transparent.
The moment things started going downhill for me, I knew it was happening. I knew how to stop it, and I knew how much it would hurt me.
Doing the right thing, taking the right actions, and letting the wrong arrows of other peoples choices pierce through your heart in order to make the better choice rarely feels like it’s worth it until later.
I made a choice. I chose to do the right thing for the situation I was put in, but I also made a very active choice not to do the right thing for myself. I was tired of taking care of myself, and always looking at the bright side. I was tired of being nice to everyone else and receiving the shit end of the stick in return. I made an active choice to not go through the right process of grieving and pain and to let myself be bitter instead, because it felt better. All I knew that I wanted was temporary ease. I hadn’t felt like I had been able to be angry at God or people or circumstances previously because I always knew it wouldn’t be the right thing to do, and because I have always wanted to do the right thing for the longterm. This time, I was taking anger at full force. You fuck with me, you lose me and I didn’t care at all.
It’s amazing how fast anger can take hold of your thoughts, your lifestyle, your being. I felt pain at every turn. I saw words twist from helpful to detrimental in split seconds as they soar from one person’s mouth into my ears. I’ve never known myself to be as cruel as I felt or as careless as I was. I didn’t care about anyone else, and why would I? No one stood up for my character when I was being torn apart and for that I was angry. I didn’t want to care.
Anger puts this film over your eyes that causes every wonderful thing to look harmful. It changes every friend into a foe, and every light into fire. No one is safe.
If only I had chose to grieve, chose to deal with my anger, chose to silence my bitter thoughts. Had I, I wouldn’t have gotten to the point of contemplating death every moment of every day. I became defeated.
If you saw me, you would know. I could not stop the tears and I could not stop the pain; all I wanted was for it to end. I understand depression. I understand suicide. I understand pain.
There was a time I would have asked of a depressed friend to live, even only if it was for me. I now know I can never ask that of anybody. I cannot ask for someone to endure pain for my comfort, or live through terror for the “someday” that might come and be peaceful. I cannot ask for life of somebody else, I can only enter their space and give them everything I have to give. It’s crucial.
Depression is a hand, holding, crushing, dragging you into the depths of the earth, into the pit of despair, with no branches strong enough to break your fall and no comfort long enough to take a deep breath. Depression is a weight of a hundred horses treading on top of the canopy of blankets you try to hide under just to find a moment where your mind can be silent. Depression is… a venomous snake wrapped so tightly around your body you cannot breathe but with every pulse of your heartbeat you know it’s the end… Depression… is an ocean of breathtaking pain.
I see the world with that pain in my eyes, much in the same way I used to see it with beauty.
If you know how I feel then you know what I mean. Good things that happen don’t make up for what we see behind the wall we’re so desperately trying to build to keep the horde of pain and anger at bay. It’s terrifying to watch that wall being broken apart and running out of the strength to keep building. It’s almost as if you drop that wall and run as fast as you can to add distance before turning around and building again. It’s coming and you see it; you feel it… and then you make one mistake and it swarms around you from all sides; all you have left is a little tent to cry in.
If you know then you know. And if you don’t, now you do.
My reality.
Not everything works out for me. That’s just not real life. I do have crazy awesome things happen in my life, but I also learn every single day how to live better with what I have. I read books with topics on self awareness, personality, connection, living in the present, and loving on purpose. I also have people in my life that are constantly keeping up with my feelings and telling me how I could be better. It’s more so how I choose to live than how my life is. Even with all the good; I have really bad days, I go through depression all too often, I get hurt, I get let down, I get pushed away, and along with experiencing close deaths and close rejection, I have needs and unfulfilled desires. Why wouldn’t I be honest about that? I have nothing to hide but my most personal encounters, and those are not hidden because of regret, but stored in my mind and journals as encounters of love and loss that are too precious to be shared until the moment calls for it.
My pains are no less than anybody else’s, because they’re mine and they’re what I’m connected with. You wouldn’t understand my pain, and I wouldn’t understand yours, but we both understand the word all too well. Pain is pain, just as hurt is hurt, just as rejection is rejection, and we can all learn from how each other processes it all, even though the situations are different. (A reason I don’t post about the specific situation I’m going through, but my feelings, thoughts, and beliefs on how to deal with the pain or hurt of it.)
I choose the life I want to see myself live. That’s where I keep my focus, that’s where my perspective stems from and that’s what I hold on to in dire moments when I am falling apart. I oftentimes talk to my reflection in the mirror just to convince myself back into a better reality or I’ll even stare into my eyes until I come to a realization that I’m better than how I’m feeling in that moment. Honestly, these things are so real for me. Sometimes dealing with falling apart looks like allowing what some might see as insanity for a moment to shed light on your inmost thoughts that you can’t reach normally. In these times I think back through my past and find what held me together, then relive it until I believe it. If I can notice the patterns in my life, I can more easily convince myself that I’m okay now. The things I tell myself today with words and thoughts is what’s going to set up how I will be thinking in the days to come.
I want to learn about anything and everything, so when people come and tell me about an opinion or passion that they have, I soak it up. If I notice they have something in their life and personality that I want; I ask, listen, and become a sponge for their words. But as I continue to figure out what my beliefs are and how powerful of a person I am, I realize that I often don’t question what these people say to me. In a conversation recently with one of the people I highly look up to about their beliefs, I found myself so naturally questioning him and returning my opinion on the subject. Only then did I realize that I had reached a level with him that I thought would take me years of knowledge. He is a person who’s beliefs are brilliant, but I found out in that moment that mine are just as powerful and valid. We can both learn from how the other thinks and their outcomes.
It’s not that everything works out for me… It doesn’t. Honestly, many days I think I have the worst luck, but that’s because all I know is what I experience, and I choose to keep learning from every experience I find myself in. Even though that doesn’t stop the tears when I want something and things go wrong, it does help me to make more sense of real life and understand that things don’t happen how we expect and we just gotta roll with it. Something else is sure to happen that will change our history. We can’t keep sitting in our disappointment because what we have in front of us is the destiny we are waiting for.
Our destiny is what we are living in right now. We are making and changing history with every decision, every hurt, every moment, and every outcome.
Makari Asriel
The force of life
There’s a sweet romanticism that takes place in life by choosing to be free in loving, living, and giving yourself permission to have joy in abundance. You may not believe in it, but there’s an essence of what “life” is that I like to describe as a force that is constantly pushing and pulling for things to either work out or be brought apart. I am a firm believer in everything happening for a reason, the good and bad, accomplishments and mistakes, even the happenstance of slipping down the stairs or crashing your car. Every one moment leads you to your next, and so on. Coincidence is a life force played out.
Thing’s happen in our lives everyday that are the cause of other people’s life events happening. It is not about us, it’s about the success of humankind. The more you can allow yourself to be one with the world and with life, the easier and more connected you will be to your own self and to other people.
True connection and intimacy is something we all search for and all believe we find in various places and people. The problem with this is that a lot of people look for intimacy in relationship with people when the connection they so desire is with life itself. This force is telling them that they are disconnected, and they search their whole lives to feel connected and never end up satisfied with the results. Sex is designed as one of the greatest connections in intimacy, so people conclude that this is the ultimate encounter for connection. Those feelings last for a bit, but as soon as the desire for connection returns, people come back to sex again and again to have that “fix.” As soon as the connection with that person starts to lessen, people create thoughts that it’s the partner’s fault or maybe even their own so they move on to another, and the cycle of searching for intimacy in relationships continues.
When I talk about romanticism with life, my reasoning for that word is that there is a love that transpires in this force of life that works to intertwine itself within your day to day being. It’s a connection. It’s an intimacy. Life WANTS you to succeed in what you do and become the greatest possible at it. The terrible parts of your life often times lead to the greatness and success in other people lives. This sweet connection with our life force allows us to understand better that our situations are not our own but a collection of what takes place in life. We are what we look at in other people to be the greatest. When we are seeing other people’s success and wishing that were ours, they are seeing ours the same way.
We believe what we think. We become what we believe. We become what we behold. Our lives are too precious and beautiful to waste our time with fears of failure.
Failure is an idea, not often a reality. Your “failure” is still a success, but your thought process keeps a void present in your life that needs to be filled with intimacy to “overcome” or “fill” these feelings that you’re not good enough. We are constantly feeling either a love or hate from the things we encounter in life, and depending on how connected we are to our thought process and knowing what our personal intake of the world is, our feelings are going to be different. We have to make sure that what we think and believe about life is how we actually want to see it.
Our thoughts change our perception. Our perception changes our connection. Our connection changes history. Keep pressing into a better reality, a better thought process, and a better connection. This “life force” is our key to thriving.
As always with love, Makarios Asriel
My bleeding thoughts
It’s hard to talk about just what it is we are thinking about. We’re scared that our inner being is too fragile or too “bad” to share how we actually feel. But if we did, we would understand how to better love people specifically based on their thought-life (i.e. encouragement if they’re thinking negative, hugs if they’re feeling lonely..etc.)
I don’t want to be worried about other people’s opinions about what I think. If you have a different opinion, great, that’s your opinion. I won’t be satisfied with keeping my mouth shut about what I believe. I know that I don’t know everything, and in many areas I’m still figuring out what it is I believe and what feels right to me. It’s a process, it’s a journey, and I’ll be on it for a long time.
This is how I choose to think about the way I have decided to live my life. I’m not okay with doing what I’m “supposed” to do or what I’m “told” to do for this reason: if I don’t go out and experience the things that I don’t know, how will I ever know what it is I really believe or ever truly understand people who believe differently than I do? I won’t.
The whole “learn from other people’s experience” thing does not work for me. Maybe you’re cool like that, but I’m definitely not. Everybody’s different, so if one person believes they have made a mistake, it might not actually be a mistake to somebody else.
There is so much judgment about people in this world. Most people fear what they don’t understand. Also, most people don’t know how to respond correctly in situations that they have never had a “connection” to, or an experience of.
Some of my best friends have been able to experience this since knowing me. I’ve been able to open their eyes to a whole new aspect of loving people they used to only love from the “outside” and because they’re “supposed” to love everybody, but now they can love them truly as they love themselves because they understand these different peoples worlds. How amazing.
I haven’t necessary made the best choices while pursuing this lifestyle but I can tell you that I wouldn’t change it for anything. I am who I am because of it and I get to live an amazing life where I can travel, experience different cultures, and make friends everywhere I go.
I am so loved because I choose to love. I am understood because I choose to understand. Everyone wants to feel like they are understood, so everyone who sees that you trying to understand them will accept you, faults and all.
Just my thoughts, Makarios
Makari Asriel 