Only you can grant yourself strength.
Dig deep to show the world
you are the epitome of personal power.
Change your history.
Glorify your present
by overcoming your past.
Give your future
the best of you.
Watch how you rise.
Inspired by BrewNSpew Cafe – Epitome – 1/28/19
I’m not yours! I am mine.
It’s the place underneath the obvious.
I wanna go deep.
Time to overcome this unease.
I wanna be still.
To excise the superficial, project the truth.
I wanna be real.
To let the music carry me on its wings.
I wanna feel free.
Reveal the tenderness and compassion buried in my pain.
I wanna be me…
I wanna to be happy.
Life doing its unintentional thing can hurt.
I weep, pull myself up and move on.
People’s forced recklessness do harm.
I weep inconsolably,
going deeper into my shell.
Feelings amplified in this echo chamber.
Can’t hear the external anymore.
I hide for a while,
working everything out inside.
And I emerge.
Lessons
I’ve had more than a few.
Expand into your uncomfortable zone.
Relish the anguish.
Capture your strength.
Propel into your future.
Just because you dared.
Cravenly holding on when both should be letting go.
It will get better.
Struggling, wishing for the scenarios of rosier times.
Hoping it gets better.
Reality churns out a present of mediocre.
It’s not getting better.
Feeling panic and sadness, a demise is imminent.
It must get better!
Fade to black…
Now, I’ll get better.
I love this song for so many reasons. But that one line in the chorus “Everything that kills me makes me feel alive…”, that knocked something over in me internally and got my attention. It hooked me hard, the rest of the lyrics just kept pulling me in deeper.
When you think of the Chinese philosophy, this video captures the two principles distinctly. Yin – negative, dark, and feminine and Yang – positive, bright, and masculine whose interaction influences the destinies of creatures and things.
Throughout the music video, you can see the contrast playing out. Hope, despair. Doing life your way, being led. Determination, defeat. Good, evil. Fighting the establishment, following it. Every bit of being engaged in either spectrum will lead you to the results you experience in your life. Fact.
That one line though is the point – we all need to get to our darkest depths to escape and break through to the other side where there’s light. Crumbling from defeat is where life begins again. We have to experience it all to have it be a whole life, to feel complete throughout the entirety of it.
Every time I listen to this, I imagine the tastiness of living fully engaged.
It feels good and bad.
I say defiantly
!!!!
Uttered with recalcitrant anger through gritted teeth; words forcefully arising out of my clenched mouth.
I’ve not let my life, situations, people or anything end me. Yet.
I grant a thank you, of sorts, to the pain played out by substandard friends, broken relationships, betrayals, nature’s force and every disturbing event determined to pierce me in my psyche.
It’s a necessary process, albeit grueling and inconvenient.
Enduring hardships becomes my opportunity to best myself.
I welcome the growth, but I do despise the adversity.
There’s no escape from struggles, or hurt and pain.
The victory gives me just enough strength for the next battle.
