For My Sake

At some point in my life, I'm not exactly sure when, I stopped living for me. Not completely but a good portion of me surely did. Without knowing it, I became a people pleaser. A kind of 'Yes' man to anybody looking for something, whether it was money they wanted, a job done or a ride somewhere. Whatever, I just became an old reliable and that, was where the separation of me began. Something inside of me was looking for acceptance and wanting people to like me and it appeared that they liked me if I gave them what they were looking for. Regardless of how trivial. The same went with relationships. To me, happiness appeared when I was making the other person happy, or so it seemed. If I felt disappointed for some reason or another, I just pushed those feelings inside. I was going to say aside, but that wouldn't have been right. Inside, was indeed, more appropriate.

In some instances, such as birthdays, Christmas, Valentines or anniversary's, I went a tad overboard in trying to be a pleaser. Because I thought that if I gave more, I would be loved or liked more. For me, it was all about the reaction I would get. The instantaneous moment of joy upon the reveal. And of course, always trying to outdo myself the next time around. But I guess I was missing the point of what was happening and couldn't see the forest for the trees. It's just that now, I look back on certain events of my life and I see a lot of emptiness. Memories yes, for sure. But a lot more emptiness. Sometimes I punish myself with these memories and other times I am grateful for them. For in each remembrance, I am reminded that at least, I had those moments.

As the days peel away from the calendar and I approach that next milestone birthday, I sit back and take stock of the past almost 50 years. Like everybody, I have had my trials and tribulations and I have survived. But now, I no longer want to just survive. I want to be able to enjoy what the future has to offer me. But I want to be prepared for it. In the past 4 months I have become fully conscious of a lot of my own character defects and want to deal with them in an appropriate fashion. But, I also want to work on those things that have caused me to put myself second or third or last. I'm trying to be careful in a lot of ways. Being slow and deliberate. A lot of this writing has benefited me greater than I could have imagined. It forces me to confront things that I took as ordinary and normal. I have realized that there was nothing normal about it.

And finally, I have done a lot of reading. And I don,t just read for the sake of reading. Maybe I over think what it is I am reading sometimes but only because I want to give the author the respect deserved for the courage it took to share some of their journey with us. I have seen people become fearless in dealing with things that have scarred their hearts. When you see their words in print, that is all we see. The words. We can only imagine the journey they went on to get through to the essence of their pain. And yes, some of us can identify with those journeys but we each have that little bit of uniqueness that makes our stories exactly that, our stories. And their courage gave me the courage to reach within and deal honestly with the excess baggage I have carried. You see, I am doing this for me. So that I can continue to have days that I can laugh at myself and take care of me.