Why Waste Your Time On Negativity...

... when there's so much good to do in the world?

In my incapacitated and vulnerable state, I've had a lot of time to think. I keep getting phone calls from my bosses, wondering where something is or if something got sent out or what kind of tea Mr. Rosenfeldt of the 4:15 meeting prefers. I answer my cell phone, albeit begudgingly, and I am aware that I sound like a prepubescent F to M trans who has laryngitis. There was a time when I'd do everything I could just to stave off any showing of weakness - maybe quitting my jobs, just to avoid having to admit that I get sick - but those days are gone. Now I relish the opportunity to show that I'm human.

"(The Perception of) Weakness v. (The Perception of) Strength" is a topic I've been thinking a lot about. I spent a great deal of my life with power struggles: with my family, with my friends, with my lovers and love interests, with employers, etc. I always had to prove something to someone: to my parents, that I'm a capable individual who needs to find her own way and be her own person; to my friends, that I wasn't some punk with no life experience aka street cred (read: aka value); to my lovers and love interests, that I'm not just some kid to be taken advantage of; to anyone I meet in an office or job situation, that I'm worthy of the position and, further, that I'm their work salvation, able to do anything and everything and still be pleasant. I've always raised the standards for myself particularly high.

Maybe that's why I was drawn to politics; with high standards came high opinions of me. I scrambled to get to the pinnacle of whatever I was engaged with, and people responded positively to this facet of my personality. Doors that other people - most people - covet were ceremoniously opened to me. Situations that seem unfathomable - work experiences, dating experiences, sexual experiences, educational experiences, et al. - were conjured into reality. I'd found that in faking an all-powerful persona, I could have anything I wanted. Anything less was admitting fault and weakness, and would definitely not lead to success as easily.



I'm no longer that aggressive, attention- and success-craving would-be mogul of all things under the sun. I now take my time in deciding what it is that I want, and why it is that I want it. I've wasted too much time blindly attaining the highly-coveted, and when I look back on it, I realize that I was the personification of the cold-blooded, machine-like psueudo-personality that proliferates our culture. Even though I denied it at the time, money, material wealth, status, and other markers of elitism were what I aspired to gain.

Ironically, after taking the time to figure myself out, know my own motivations, and accept and relish my place in the greater scheme of things, I am in more of a position to aspire to great heights. Only, now I don't have the pressure of failure or doubt or regret. What I have is the engrained knowledge that at my core, I'm a good person, and everything I do - travel to a foreign land, befriend strangers at a coffee shop, rise to a position of perceived power, take out the garbage, plant flowerbeds all day - is beautiful. What I don't have is a necessary goal with which to hang myself. I just know the general trajectory of where I want my life to go, and what I need to achieve that track. In this weightless and positive existence of opportunities and adventures, sky's the limit to the good I can do.