Think for yourself, draw your own conclusions.

I've never been a good follower. It seems to me that one draw of gang mentality young people have is that there is seemingly stability and safety joining other lost angry souls banded together to claim spaces and properties. They use hand codes and colors to signal to the world this is who I am. I am gang member X. In theory, there is stability of sorts and safety when we join giant herds of folks. In reality they are telling us what to think and what to wear and who to love and which to vote for.

There are times I have so desperately wished that i could just "drink the Koolaide" and follow the cows in the mindless herd. I wished I WERE Democrat or Republican or a Rotarian or even a Shriner just to name a few ready-made herds to fall into. It is easier to follow than to think original thoughts. It's easy to go with what is popular and ignore all signs my spirit is hurling at me that this doesn't fit me, this isn't for me, this is someone else's idea of safety, someone else's idea of "right" , someone else's idea of what is right.

I wasn't raised to think independently. It's not something I learned how to do in the home or in the school. I sort of came to earth with an immunity to herd mentality. I never fell into a group that wanted to think for me that felt "right". Even in Narcotics Anonymous which I credit solely for making a human out of me, the main goal for members is to quit using and have our own unique, one of a kind experience as a sober human,so that we can share our EXPERIENCE with others.

It suffocates me when I see smart, thoughtful people manipulated by news channels, talking heads, media outlets ran people people who need them to be so frightened and concerned about losing what is already theirs, or not getting what they someday want, they happilly turn over pocket books and votes to the man with the loudest microphone. Fearful people, panicked people can be taught to dance like puppets because they no longer listen to their own production of thoughts and feelings about what is right or wrong.

I don't see how that could be a very spiritually or emotionally fulfilling way to live.Giant religious organizations depend on people not asking questions, our government would rather us not delve into all of the comings and going and financials of them. People have to be held accountable in some form or another and that requires someone to question things.

At the birth of our Nation, someone started the thought process that England taxing the crap out of the Settlers was intolerable. Average people started the underground railroad to get slaves out of hell in the south. My head and spirit cannot wrap themselves around the idea that no one close to Hitler didn't object to his crazy plan and his murderous. heinous acts and kill him when his back was turned.

Edmond Burke wrote "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing".

That happens when no one is thinking original thoughts, no one is coming up with their own ideas about what is right or wrong in their own eyes. I have no desire , to live disconnected from my own experience. If I dress like you, wear my hair like you, talk like you, or vote like you, I would be having YOUR experience and not my own. I am clear about many things, one central one is I am a spirit having a human experience. That experience needs to be my own. No, it has to be. I need medication when I'm not living my own truth. I need medication in order to try and kill off the part of me that says "This isn't right", the part of me that knows the good part of me is comatosed.

The very human side of me knows it would be easier to fall into a ready made identity as a human. It would be too easy for my human part to embrace the identity of being an Aggie or a Longhorn, a Tea Partier, a Christian, a Buddhist and stop there. Like manufactured homes that come with furniture, homes that all you have to do is hang your clothes in the closet and BAM! You are done. Do we Embrace any of the prefab identities and just be done with the hard questions of "Who the hell am i" and "What do I believe"?

If it weren't for the part of me connected to something BIGGER than me, it would be easy to submit to a ready made me. The truth for me is, it isn't fulfilling to be a Lemming. I was born rejecting the categories that humans are suppose to fall into. My instinct wants to say I tried very hard to fit in the shadow boxes that the world created that let others know who we are and what we are about, but I think maybe I never really did try that hard. I understood from the get-go on some level beneath my thought that "this cutout" wasn't me. The real pain came for shoving my big foot into someone else's tiny shoe.

I've learned to love the fact that I have my own perspective. I see things differently that anyone I know. It's great to bump into someone that shares some common views with me but, it isn't my end game strategy. I'm here for MY own strange, trippy, trip. This is my spiritual journey in human form and it would be the biggest waste in the history of man for me to let someone else be in charge of my journey. I'm responsible. I'm responsible for what I know, and one thing I know is no one can think for me, love for me, live for me or learn for me. I am responsible for my journey, I am responsible for myself. Today, just for today, I am responsible.

In the end, and I do mean the very end, it will not matter what title is in front of my name or the letters and designations that do/do not follow it. It will not matter what a big fine house I lived in or it will not matter what a big fine car I drove. At that end, what I did strictly for me , dies with me.  All that will remain is the ripple effect of the things I  touched with kindness, love and forgiveness.. I hope my ripple effect reflects the touch of peace. the touch of creativity. the touch of compassion, the touch of grace and the joy of laughter. When I lay down in that fateful field of strangers or my ashes take flight into the four winds, I hope I’ve left a ripple, that then became a wave.

In 5th grade i had a teacher named Mrs. Killion. She was a large chested round southern black woman who had a penchant of saying "I'm from Missouri, You have to SHOW ME" For those of you like myself, who never heard this old saying, it is one of the unofficial state mottoes. It meant nothing to me at the time but I woke up this morning thinking about some of the young boys at the place where I work, specifically when they are hit with a big feeling and they don't know what to do with it. Most of the time whatever the feeling is consumes them like a dry tree in a forest fire. No one has ever shown them what to do with a big feeling.

I've shared bits and pieces of this concept before but I personally keep revisiting it because I'm just not through with it yet. We are born human but people have to show us, model for us what humanity looks and feels like.

Case in point, my dad used to raise exotic birds like Parrots and Macaws. Some pairs would lay eggs and daddy would have to take the eggs immediately out of the nest box, because the birds did not know how to sit on the eggs and keep them warm. Other birds new how to sit on the eggs but the moment the baby birds hatched, the parents abandoned them and they would starve to death because the birds just didn't know how to raise their babies. Those babies were pulled the moment they hatched and fed by my stepmother with a tiny eyedropper every 2 hours for weeks.

The birds had been bred in captivity so long that the parenting/ reproduction skill sets were completely lost. None of them could parent because they never saw it done and the instinct literally left them.

It's a big ass deep thought for me when I see boys of 14 consumed by anger or fear. No one ever taught them healthy ways of dealing with big feelings. No one taught me either and I mistakenly assumed that I was suppose to magically no how to do it. I felt ashamed at my lack ability to function through big emotion, I thought it was a defect of personality on my part. I didn't know that I was supposed to have been shown what do.

I get it now. Kids need to be shown what love looks like. They need to see how you treat the people you love and what your words sound like when you deal with your loved ones. Kid's need to see what forgiveness looks like . They need ringside seats to when compassion is shown to those who can do nothing for you. They need to see perseverance when a dream is collapsing down on someones head and they need to see that feelings aren't fatal. Neither is "failure".

We cannot rise above our level of programming. If we failed to get any quality programming or modeling as a child and lessons in humanity, we aren't magically going to wake up with them as adults. I'm reprogramming myself on a daily basis with a multitude of sources of new ideas, I'm gathering things I either missed as a child or wasn't exposed to. One big ass ugly feeling isn't enough today to shut me down completely and declare Marshall Law. It is only because I have witness friends and associates face the impossible and get through it that I am able to tell myself "My story doesn't end here". My peers and friends "model" those things that make me a good, capable, functioning human today and I learn from everyone I come in contact with.

I may have those moments when I get so mad it feels like i have been doused and soaked in gasoline and lit on fire, but I don't go into "ULTIMATE SELF DESTRUCT" mode when it happens.

How do we teach children that we are not slaves to our emotions, that one bad feeling isn't enough to implode upon ourselves. How do we let kids know, that what your having is a feeling and it will most certainly pass. Just don't take an action where you harm yourself or others and don't let the bad feeling have so much power you give away your future because of the pain of the present.

We all have to be shown. We joke about life not coming with a manual, it's because actions speak louder than words. I guess I'm am from Missouri, "You got to show me" too Mrs. Killion.

My favorite quote is from actress, alcholic, drug addict, clinically depressed, bipolar Carrie Fisher, who said. "Losing your mind is a terrible thing but once it's gone it's fine. Completely fine, because there is no longer a part of you that knows the rest of you is missing" I kept waiting for the part of me that KNEW the rest of me was missing to die off so I could embrace the coma and find peace in my mind.

What I figured out is the part that would give up, that knew there was indeed something missing was my spirit. My mind gave up long ago but the spirit just wouldn't freaking relent. I have no human reason to come up with that explains how I found the nerve and strength to try to salvage this trip of mine, in this body on the third rock from the sun but it happened.

My gambling friend Kay was terribly terribly ill for a good period and the doctors couldn't find out what was wrong with her. She said she made a promise that if she ever felt well enough to return to the land of living she would go and not stop, that is what she vowed to do. She got better and she is a crazy ,cyclonic force of life to be reckoned with today. I think the biggest perk of coming back for the edge of darkest dark, is this overwhelming gratitude just to be here at the party- Invited, honored, grateful guests. I can't imagine what the story , my story, would have been had I got the thing i prayed for countless times, literally in hot water up to my neck in a garden tub so large you could have misplaced a Volvo in it. My desperate nekkid prayer was to let me out of the mess or let me surrender the part that knew the rest of me was missing.

I see people, displaced, disenfranchised, discombobulated and detached. They have no part of them left that knows the other part is missing and it does NOT look like the respite I sought.They, these men without homes or attachment, wander in the NA hall which is down from the Rescue Mission, for a free cup of coffee. Skin so beaten by the cruel rays of sun it's like thick untreated cheap South American leather. Fingers, darkened to the point of looking like old cigars, hair untended, unkempt and defiant. They walk in and make eye contact with no one, Sometimes they consciously or unconsciously run their ruddy fingers across their wild hair as if there might still be a thread of a person inside that once knew a social grace. Some mutter or sometimes shout at the voices in their own heads but mostly, they just remind me that sometimes there is the most beautiful grace of all is unanswered prayer.

I talked to a homeless man in the hall a couple of years ago, it was springtime and the storms had been occurring regularly we get in April and May here. I don't know how he got from Texarkana to Longview but he came for Mother's Day. His mother was buried in the cemetery behind Krogers and he had slept the night before our conversation, on what he called his mother's land- which was just big enough for the box she was buried in, underneath him in the cemetery behind the Kroger. The meeting started , he got one more cup of coffee and then he returned to wherever people go when they disappear. It rained again that night and I thought about him looking to make a connection with something, anything, even it was a plot of dirt and a headstone marking the life and death of his mother. Perhaps all he was sure of was he was once this woman's son.

He told his story with out emotion, it was just matter of fact, he was completely removed and unaware of the tragedy and depth of his accounting. He showed me, and people all around show me exactly what it looks like when " there is no longer a part of you left that knows the rest of you is missing" really looks like. It didn't and doesn't seem like a solution to me today, the killing of the "kwowing" of my "being". Frankly, I don't think I even ever really came close to it. There was always this crazy tiny voice, perhaps the voice of God, perhaps the voice of Mrs. Butterworth, who knows, but something kept whispering, and though I wasn't aware I was listening it kept stating " the story need not end today,the story need not end here."

The author of my favorite quote is still here too. She speaks and she writes in a voice I understand, a wisdom I too have earned from my dance with the "darkest dark". She writes in gratitude and with a humor that all can appreciate but only those who have tried repeatedly to disappear within ourselves forever truly can breath in fully.

I say a prayer for the people so locked up in themselves, that fail to recognize any part of themselves any longer. It's so easy to get lost and so very hard to fight your way back. It's a fight worth fighting. I haven't been trapped in my own thoughts in a long time. I know longer try to "think" myself to sleep at night, but most miraculous is, I know who I am today and I know the sound of my own voice and I like the sound of it. I LIKE the truth as i have unearthed it for myself, to blaze a streak across my computer screen and hopefully shine the light from it into the God awful "Darkest of Darks" in some other poor son of a bitches life who surrendered to the wrong thing.

'Do NOT SURRENDER DOROTHY!"

As my dear kindred likes to say, "That is all, carry on"! You know i don't have the ability to see my typos and errors hope it still reads ok. I'm a writer that prefers content over the crossing of the T's and the dotting of the I's. But that's just me.

This is a true, true testament to recovery and the changes it brings about. My whole life, I have never wanted too many "things". I didn't want belongings. I left a few apartments full of everything I owned and just took my clothes when I felt it was time to go. I've never found that possessions made me feel like most others do with "their stuff". I got no identity from the things I owned or the car I drove/drive. In fact there have been times when I gave away or threw away stuff when I felt like I had to much "stuff".

When I moved into my apartment I had basically a bed, a tv and a computer and some clothes. Five months into it, I have a love seat by a great great maker, and things I have picked up that I connected with on some level. A couple weeks ago I had a moment of panic when I was leaving because i realized, I had "things" and I really liked them. When I got my new TV my mom mentioned checking into renters insurance. My first inclination was, I don't have anything worth insuring. Finally a couple of days ago it dawned on me, if someone in my 8 unit vintage complex burned this place down by accident, I would have to start all over.

I love my tiny apartment and every piece of furniture, wall hangings and yes, FABRIC that covers the pine paneled great wall of Gladewater. I got renters insurance today. Me, the guy wanted to own nothing, to be responsible for nothing, to "never own more than I can fit in the back of a Chevette Hatchback" got insurance on MY STUFF. At least this way if the worst happens, I won't have to start with nothing again. I have grown accustomed to how my "home rises up to meet me" when I open the front door.

I told Stephanie tonight via text the twist and turn of life make it interesting. Don't know whether this is a twist or a turn but it is yet another surprising element of living a recovered life. God, what next, a baby?

I think that, at least in the western culture we are so preconditioned to "happily ever after" that anything that doesn't end with bow on it when the credits begin to roll is viewed as a failure. The stark sobering reality is more often than not, things don't go or end the way we plan them to in our head. When that happens does it mean there is absolutely no value left it in?
How can someone be married or married 20 or 30 years and see that time as a failure? Or how could someone be clean and sober for 15 years and feel like they failed recovery? The real life story will rarely if ever live up to the fantasy forever and ever after. My observation is that our human lives are comprised of endless stops and starts. My fav. cousin has had more real life tragedy than any one person I have known and she said an interesting thing as just an afterthought tacking it on to our conversation. "Life is just a string of experiences strung together by our hearts".
If I can focus on the fact that my life is a collection of experiences with very few linear narratives, I am much less apt to label anything as an epic failure. When I see and remember, it is the string of events and experiences that make up my life. There will be no one story I attach to that will ultimately put the stamp of success or failure on my entire time on the planet as a human. Some stories we live are short stories, some great loves, as Carrie Bradshaw bemoans in "Sex in The City" are not sweeping epic novels.
To live a fulfilling life I have to somehow learn to absorb all the life from the short bursts of life as it happens. I must extract all the joy, love, sadness, hurt, happiness and hope in the smallest of moments and let go of the screwed up Disney tales that we all live happily ever after with no effort on our part. If we are the luckiest of " luckies" , the only thing that will be with us the entire trajectory of our lifespan are one or two family members or one good friend. All the rest of the stories that will unfold will neither value our worthiness no will it devalue you the worth of our time here.
I wish I had known earlier when I saw clearly that something was NOT going to last or work out like I hoped , that is didn't mean that the thing was a failure, it was just one of the many occurrences in life that presents itself then fades away for whatever reason and the only common thread between them all it the string my heart strings them together with. We must let the story end so the new one can begin. "Let it GO, let it gooooo".

I'm not in love, just forget it, it's just a silly phase I'm going through....

I've had a long history of vivid dreams that stir up so much emotion that I am completely out of whack for a solid day afterwards. I'm pretty sure I have mentioned before that I have only been in love once in my life and that was when I was 18. For a quarter of a century my psyche brings that old love up in dreams and makes it feel as fresh as yesterday. It's been like losing that relationship over and over dozens of times again and again. As I started getting better, the dream has changed a bit. My old love shows up but I am not devastated and lonely and desperate for his love again. Night before last I dreamed about John. I was in mad love for him still in the dream and he was sick. He was dying and as madly in love with him as I was , he was madly in love with someone else. He had no place to go so I took him in and cared for him while he died. Me holding him wishing it were different but being ok with the fact he won't ever be able to love me like I love him. It was impossible to have the outcome I had secretly wanted all these years. When I woke up it made me think, my love for him was not lessened, it wasn't returned but my love was real. It just didn't look like the way I thought it was suppose to look like. Love not returned doesn't devalue the miracle of caring for someone. My love for many people who have gone is just as real, big and worthy of awe as when I had those people to love. Love never moves out of the heart, you don't have to be with me to marvel at this fantastic thing humans can experience. I didn't spend the day bummed out like the dream used to do to me. The Disney kid in me wants to believe that it will come again and we will have a happy ending but the self actualized spiritual me is grateful to just know the sensation once in my life. Whever I ever see him or hold his hand again , I am connected. It doesn't hurt like it used to. I know it's special because I had never felt that power before or sense, not even close. It was something special that I know my heart can be that full and alive.  I have compassion for those two messed up kids that tried to play house with no coping skills and budding drug addiction and alcohol. Maybe he was my first good drug. Like most drugs, the first high is always the one you chase, over and over.  I just thought it was a neat dream. I hope to love people regardless of if they can love me back in the way I wish they would, consistently.

Treatment is a LUXURY not a Necessity

I am in recovery for substance abuse and I work in or around the recovery field.  Every time a celebrity is whisked off to rehab it sends the message to substance abusers and the people who love them, that in order to recover from alcoholism and drug abuse you must go to treatment. In Texas, if you don’t have private pay insurance or you aren’t on probation or parole, or have a big private bankroll,  it is nearly impossible to go to a treatment center because we don’t have many with other funding options.

When Oak Haven closed in Marshall, it was the last house on the block of treatment centers in East Texas for people who did not fall into specialty niches that still have funding available. There is little to no funding to put “Joe or Susie Average “in treatment in Texas.

The good news is, and it is good news, for nearly 80 years AA has been saving lives and restoring drunks to wholeness. NA has been doing the same for over 61 years.

TREATMENT IS A LUXURY, not a necessity.

If a man or a woman can admit they can’t use successfully and their life is unmanageable, they can recover with meetings that take place several times a day. every day of the week for no cost. No insurance necessary.

I have had my phone number attached to several information lines for NA and AA for years. I get calls from people who are at the end of their ropes and they have no idea what can be done.

Here is the straight dope about Alcoholism and Addiction recovery. If you are an addict or alcoholic, it only gets worse. It will end with “Jails, institutions or death”. End of story. You drag everyone that dares to keep loving you right through the gates of torment and hell.

Treatment facilities are a great place to get a lot of information quickly, but ultimately you go to AA or NA meetings on your own volition, if you stay sober.

Some calls I get or got, were from Grandparents raising their grandkids, parents at wits end over their kids drug abuse, spouses, lovers and friends who’s own lives are in shambles because they love a drunk or dope head.

More good news here, those people can regain their lives and sanity in two programs called Alanon and Naranon. These are family groups that work in conjunction with the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Addiction is a family disease, and if you love an addict and your life has been wrecked by their drug abuse, YOU can regain sanity in your life whether or not your alcoholic or addict ever recovers.

To recover or to be restored, made whole again, is available in your town or near your town. There are meetings online these days. You don’t have to spend another day in despair. The requirement for membership for both NA and AA is simply, you need to have the desire to quit. You don’t have to quit before you come. You can’t do it alone and most of us can’t. It is best to come with a clear head ,but the important thing is you keep coming back.

In this dark situation of chemicals, despair, and obliterated family relationships, there is a quiet promise of recovery from NA and AA.

YOU CANNOT USE THE EXCUSE I CAN’T AFFORD TREATMENT. For 80 years poor people, rich people, ugly people, pretty people, white people, black people, Chinese people, street walkers, preachers, football players, mothers, grandfathers, kids, Republicans, and Democrats have gotten sober and regained their spirits and the ability to love and be loved through the miracle of recovery in  AA/NA.  

I am a member of a 12 Step Organization but I am not speaking on behalf of them. I’m speaking solely from my experience as being a broken human who used chemicals for a peace of mind that never was sustainable or attainable. I regained life through a 12 step program.

East Texas Council on Drug Addiction and Alcoholism is a clearing house for all things dealing with addiction in Longview, for the addict or the person that loves an addict.   

Things don’t magically get better for people who don’t seek help, in fact they get so bad, the horror writer Stephen King couldn’t dream up the nightmares addiction rains down on people and their families..

The websites for AA and NA are

www.NA.org

www.AA.org

If you love an addict/alcoholic, these are important websites with life and sanity saving information just for YOU.

http://www.al-anon.alateen.org/home

http://www.etcada.com/

www.naranon.org

There is freedom for active addiction, there is freedom for those whose lives have been destroyed by the disease of alcoholism and addiction. It doesn’t get better on its own, it won’t just go away. Recovery is possible and you don’t have to pay 10 thousand dollars a month to learn what is shared freely in AA and NA.

There is a way out of the darkness. Restoration to wholeness and sanity is completely possible and doable. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Misinformation regarding inpatient or outpatient treatment is killing people and letting families suffer needlessly. Recovery is hard, but active alcoholism and addiction is harder by far..

Clint G.

Anonymous Recovering
Alcoholic Addict

There are times when I hear someone speak at NA or AA that says something that alters my paradigm forever. Saturday morning a man was talking about how in recovery he revisited a lot of painful things in order to forgive the players that caused him pain. He had a bad relationship with his father and he said he would get so hurt every year when July 4th came and he begged his dad to take him to the Fireworks Display in town.

Every year he would beg and beg but his father would never take him. He was hurt and angry and it followed him into adulthood. When his dad died , he was in recovery and able to speak about the pains he carried with him he was talking to his aunt - (his dad's sister) about how it hurt him every year his dad wouldn't take him to the fire works.
His aunt listened and began to speak. "When your dad came home for World War II we went to a huge victory celebration. We ate, danced, laughed. Dark came and they had a huge firework show. I turned to your father to comment on them and he wasn't there. We started to look for him and we could find him no where. Finally of a friend told us we needed to go to help your father in the restroom. There we found him curled up in a ball in the corner next to the toilet. He was shaking and crying and out of his mind. He was Shell-Shocked and no one knew it." It's the term they used before PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It's what I say alot, "you just don't know what monsters are 2 inches away from the people you come in contact with, we don't know what horror is chasing
the folks we meet"

All those years of resentment, were instantly re-framed and forgiven for the guy at AA and it was replaced with understanding, forgiveness and compassion. If you have never had the experience where resentment is removed and forgiveness happens, when the river of life and love flows into the compartment that had been filled with pain and hurt, I urge you to think about letting a resentment go and experiencing it. We don't set the people that hurt us free, we set ourselves free.

Yesterday I went to a noon NA meeting and a fellow came in that has popped in and out with his girlfriend for a few years. He is not tall and has longish Meatloaf like hair, she comes in an array of costumes but always some variation of white gogo boots, fishnets and hot pants. They looked like to me, a couple of characters Carol Burnett's crew would have dreamed up. Her hair, I think was always died a black that surpasses any descriptive words I can muster. Girl, it was BLACK. She was never unpleasant and I was always aware when I saw them I was seeing something that was too cartoonish to be real but there they were. When I saw them I always felt like I had spotted a unicorn or something mystical and mythical. They would pick up a white key tag or a few times they celebrated 30 days but would always drift away like one fancy white cloud on an otherwise cloudless day when the wind blew. I can't think of anything they ever said or did that was repugnant in the least. So the male part of the couple came into the meeting yesterday and shared that he was struggling. He had five days clean and he was having a hard time. 
I wondered where his girlfriend and cohort was. I had never seen one without the other, sort of like Laverne and Shirley or Lenny and Squiggy. I leaned over to my friend next to me and asked "I wonder where Elizabeth is", (not her real name out of respect for anonymity"). I figured she was sitting out some time in County. My friend Jamie said, "Do you remember the lady that was tossed out dead on the road a few months ago, that was her". 
My blood ran cold. I read the story of the body they found in/near Longview on the highway. I even read the headline a month later that they identified the woman's body. I did not however read the article. For over 24 hours now this has been eating at me. Even before drug addiction, I suspect she clearly did not have the faculties, most of us have. She had things stacked against her from the beginning, she had less to work with than most of my friends here on Facebook, yet she managed to find a way to survive until someone finally put an end to her. She even had long term companionship which most of my friends of FB will nod in agreement is no easy feat. What upsets me about this story, actually it's two things. First, someone thought she was disposable. Insignificant. Like a hostess twinkie wrapper tossed from a vheicle and left roadside, someone made the decision that her life mattered not. Maybe because she was an addict, maybe because she was so quirky or maybe she just trusted the wrong person for the wrong reason, this harmless cartoon of a woman was murdered and left on the road by someone who didn't know she had value simply because she was here. She existed and that gave her value.
The second thing that upsets me is that I read that article, heard it mentioned on the news and not one time did I STOP and think, that lady they found on the highway had someone somewhere that loved them. They mattered to someone somewhere. I was caught off guard by my own callousness. I'm shocked that it wasn't until I found out I knew the woman did the story have heft to me.
Some people are seen as disposable. It's why so many prostitutes and drug addicts are murdered and the police/communities don't blink. "Let them kill themselves out" is a term I actually heard with my own ears before.
The God of my understanding sees value, purpose and love in every living creature. I'm disappointed in myself on this one because I forgot that the stories I see and hear in and on news sources are based on real people, who are loved by real people and that pain is pain and pain demands respect. I love outcasts and I am at my best with misfits. I'm so sad that one of the misfits I've enjoyed from a far was snuffed out in such brutal form. She reminds me in death and in memory to notice people, to attend people, to value people simply because they exist. I hope to do better. I hope my ears don't get so used to hearing the stories I forget the stories are about human lives, real humans. I barely knew her but I'm sure someone loved her and I"m sorry for their loss. I'm sorry the world is unkind to people who don't fit the mold. I'm sorry some people fall through the cracks. I'm sorry I walk past of field of purple and forget to notice it sometimes, but I will try to do better and not for anyone's sake but my own. I don't want to exist in human form and not realize that every human has worth and we all deserve a certain amount of respect for just getting to the age that we are whatever that is. Today I will respect life and remember behind each tragedy they trot out and across the new screen, someone's mother weeps and someone's mother cries "Why?".