Please understand that I am here and I am doing my best.
That I fall short of my own expectations,
plenty of times.
I am flawed and I am stumbling and
there are times when I wonder if
any of this is worth it so please,
do not ever think me so strong that I do not need your kindness.
Do not hate me for the mistakes I make,
or for when I get angry sometimes.
All I really want is to be seen as something better than what I see in myself

There are days where you’re alone on an ocean
in a paper boat,
watching as the water eats its way up through the hull. Turning the thin folds between you and the sea to a mush so useless it will break beneath your weight in an instant.
It’s only a matter of time, really,
before you sink

And there are days where you are flying.
When you open your eyes and realize that the wind you feel combing over your face is not from falling, but from the glide of your skin through the air as you slice
deliberately through it.
With wings instead of arms,
and a red balloon where your heart used to be

I like to think there is a stage in your mind and you, your consciousness, are sitting out in the front row with some spectacles and a notebook as all your thoughts that come and go constantly audition on the stage. To become part of your life in some way. Some of them are terrible, you dismiss them immediately. Others put on such an immersive display that you lose yourself in them for a while, caught up in the raw emotion of their act.

It’s important that you pull back to recognize: it’s you who calls the shots. You determine who and what gets a part in the show, in your life. You are not simply an embodiment of thoughts. You are the Big Director. An intelligent and capable observer who can decide what becomes of those auditionees on the stage. You can embrace them, laugh at them, drop them, or replace them someday when the time comes. They are no more a part of you than you allow them to be.

We look at animals in the wild,
watch them segregate into packs
and eat their young.
Watch them spill blood for land, for resources,
trapped in their primal race for dominance and survival.

We look on at the cut throat nature of
their lives and tell ourselves,
“Poor beasts,”
“it’s all they know.”
Slaves to instinct,
bereft of the higher thought that could
free them from their painful cycle.

What’s our excuse?
What good is consciousness,
the ability to reason if we relentlessly choose not to?
If our eyes stare, too, hungry
out into the wood.

We are not the people we imagine ourselves to be. We are who we actively work to become

Some think themselves prisoners
alone and cold in a cage from between whose bars
the light around them does not filter through.

They place their freedom in the upturned palms of lovers
keys folded into their warm hands
“You save me,” they say, “every day from this wretched place inside myself
and if you leave, I will be trapped there again.
Please don’t ever leave.”

But the hands of lovers are not keys,
they’re our inspiration. Our call to action
and our bodies are not a cage
and our minds are not a prison
and the only person that can pull us from the sinkholes that we build inside ourselves,
is ourselves.