At this point, I'm not really sure how I am going to make myself happy. I'm not really sure where I'm going to get the guts to get my life together. And truthfully, I'm not really sure my life is ever going to have been gotten together. I will always be in conflict. With myself, with the world, with the way things are and the changes that come. I will always fight. I will fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. I am absolutely relentless and I don't know how to stop. I don't know how to stop fighting. I don't know when or how to just let another person win. Let another thought win. Let everything win, and then go. I don't know how to just let it all go. I don't know how not to hate.

I don't know how to look at somebody I absolutely, positively despise in every sense of the matter, and not just get so fucking pissed off that they exist. I don't know how to just say to myself, "They are here. They are a certain way. That's the facts of it. No amount of dirty looks and rude comments is going to change that. So forgive them. Forgive them for being who they are. Forgive them for pissing you off. Forgive them for being disgusting and rude, for hurting people you love, for being annoying. Forgive them. Because they can't help it just as much as you can't help hating them for all of the above."

The way to combat hate is not with love. It is not with acceptance of hate. It is with forgiveness. It is with each and every person that exists on this much-to-tiny, annoying-to-be-alive-on planet trying their god damn hardest to forgive. This is how we stop racism, and poverty, and sexism, and homophobia, and every type of general everyday hatred that seeps out of us so freely and without control.

Forgiveness. We stop all the hatred with forgiveness.

I forgive you for living in my home. I forgive you for looking like a midget/beast. I forgive you for being so immature my internal organs begin to bleed every time you're around. I forgive you for eating all the good food that minimally exists in my house. I forgive you for causing fights in my family. I forgive you for trashing our house. I forgive you for costing my parents money. I forgive you for being the catalyst of my hate. I forgive you for bringing out the worst parts of me. I forgive you for never talking. I forgive you for causing trouble. I forgive you for being naïve.

There is nothing I do not forgive you for.

You are free from me and my hatred, free from my dirty looks and my eye rolls, free from the never ending critical comments. You are absolutely free.

And now, so am I.

I can never quite trust myself. I can never trust that the decisions I make are the right ones. And the thing is, I make each decision so cautiously, so aware, so researched, yet it comes down to my speculative emotions, time and time again. And so I can’t trust myself. I can’t trust that my gut isn’t lying. I guess I’m just not sure if what I’m feeling is my own real-life gut, screaming as my brain tries to decipher it, or some made-up gut that exists only in the flashing neurons of my imagination. I still am not sure which is which. Which is my brain, my stream of never ending thoughts that together have made up an entire other world separate from reality, or my pure reality itself, outside of flashing neurons? It seems as though I’ve created two separate worlds I must choose between- the world of who I am, and the world of who I want to be. And I’m not really sure which world I should be catering to- the ever reaching dream of who I want to be, or the everyday existence and factual reality of who I am. And really, I believe that that is one of the most pressing questions of societal existence: Do we strive to be something better, although it may stray from “who we are”? Or do we becoming fully “who we are” and accept our faults and weaknesses and discomforts thus failing to strive for something better, because it might really just be more fantasy than reality?

And the thing is, I feel that even in how I worded those two questions, the answer has been made painstakingly clear. But the other thing is, I don’t always agree with that position. I don’t always agree with myself. I’m flakey, I move back and forth between opinions and ideals and hopes. I move around and through and jump over various hoops of burning fire. One day I’m this, the next I’m that. And so where do I fit? How do I make these grotesque decisions- like where to go to college, or exactly how I want to define my own sexuality, when every day I hold a different ideal for my life? And perhaps that is where the problem lies, as I expect to mesh myself into an ideal of life- a series of events and circumstances, instead of allowing a series of events and circumstances to mesh into myself. I expect for myself to enter a world that I have predetermined, instead of predetermining myself, and allowing a world to form around me.

These are the questions I grapple with. The questions that sting me in the dark hours of the night, while my parents sit out in the mosquito infested backyard with vaguely familiar strangers who grapple privately their own unique and equally valid questions less than ten feet from where we rest our heads and conceive our children.