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When I was younger I’d often stay awake for hours thinking about what would’ve happened if my parents weren’t here. I hated knowing they would pass away some day. It literally scared the crap out of me and it just might be why I cried like a newborn child on my first day of college.
I mean, I also just cry a lot. So there’s that too.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. With one parent gone and the other needing serious medical attention, I’ve been thrown into a place I never thought I’d be in. Not at 25. I mean, most people my age (in my head, of course) are hanging at yoga studios on Saturday’s and still going to clubs on the weekend or waking up early to be school teachers.
There’s corporate jobs and moving across the country and not having to worry about your parents. Not feeling like you literally have to stay where you live. And as much as I want to do all of these crazy things I’m not a monster who is going to sacrifice being there for my family.
It’s hard, though, to see all the perfection and just feel like nobody is speaking to your situation. I never hear about people’s pain. I don’t hear these sorts of stories from self-help guru’s or business moguls. I hear about the grind or the connections they made or how they by-the-skin-of-their-teeth got through everything.
But they skip over the tragedy. I hear people’s stories nowadays and I just think to myself “WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?”. I don’t understand how you can so completely detach your work life from your personal life from your family life. As if all of these things don’t make us a complete human.
So I’m a little frustrated right now.
I’m frustrated because I feel like in a corporate, work until you become rich or die f*cking trying world we’ve abandoned what makes us fully humans. The ones we care about. The friendships. The heartbreak. The loss. The abandonment. The days we sit in the corners of our rooms screaming into our hands. Only to go on some podcast and say like “Yeah I had some hard times. But I got through it!”
THANK YOU FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
I want the details. I want the hurt. The pain, the little stories and the naked truth of it all. I’m sick of the polish when all of us look and feel like a mess. It feels like our lives have become an Instagram page. Filtered, adjusted and reduced to a select few moments. Robbed of the pain we feel for fear that it isn’t pretty or cool or polished enough.
I’m emotional, I guess, but I’m also in need of people who get vulnerable. I think we all need people who get so metaphorically naked with us we start crying. I live for that shit.
And I want a whole lot more of it.
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This post was previously published on www.byrslf.co and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Istockphoto.com