Finding Common Ground

I don't do my laundry enough, I'm impulsive, I swear too much, and I forget to eat, to breathe, to speak. Sometimes I drink too much, and sometimes I spend too much time alone. I am stuck in the painfully complex space between hating everything that I represent and embracing everything that I am.

I am scared. I am angry. I am emotional. I go for months without crying and then I sing along to a song I didn't even realize was sad and my voice starts to waver which is so foreign to me that I almost choke.

I'm empathetic which is cumbersome and hard to explain. Sometimes feelings cut through me like razor blades, and sometimes they can't get past the surface and I feel hardened, jaded. I am all at once cynical and misanthropic, optimistic and in love with the world.

I once thought the only word that could properly describe me was "paradox," and for that reason I felt disconnected, probably at a time where the word "paradox" was darkly appealing, before I made it to full height and before I found out what good music meant.  I've since graduated on to realize that everyone has a bit of it in them, a bit of that Walt Whitman contradiction.  Everyone wants and everyone doesn't want and everyone feels like sometimes they're screwing up.  We line up our scales and frantically throw weights on one end or the other to try to keep them in balance, but they are too many to keep track of, and sometimes one side of a scale hits the ground. But that has to be okay.  We have to let that be okay.