Worth It All: Reflections on my Life

It’s always the prettiest lies that cover the ugliest truths.

Pretty photographs on display in glossy yearbooks cheerfully ignore the other four senses. The bad taste, putrid smell, deafening sound, and piercing touch of those rampaging years flow past me as each page turns and I find my face— there— looking away from the cameras or into them, a smile so jolly, so fleeting. Click. The photo is taken and in the hands of yearbook staff that try to place it in the most decorative and creative way among other “matching” photos of a similar topic.

It says a lot when a person treasures the good things in life. It says even more when a person tosses away the glowing riches of bright moments like eggshells into dark plastic trash-bags. I find this second sort of person the most loathsome. They giggle, ruling their social worlds with golden scepters, smashing the fragile heads of emaciated children as they prattle on and on about their nightly outings with their friends who “should be known by everybody who’s anybody.”

I am a no one really. I am a nobody with a face, my swimming pool of genetics bequeathed me and with a name my parents labeled me when I was born. “Hello! Your name is…” and then slap on the bottom I come crying into the world so wet, so small, so cold. The world is a scary place at the beginning. I suppose I wasn’t strong enough to handle the turmoil of a childhood lived, for the most part, out of the classroom.

How do people become strong? Are there natural-born leaders who lead the masses with their unheard-of charm and sharp intellect? Are their men with the charisma and dashing good looks to make the women swoon and worship the very mud-paths he trots upon? Glamorous women leave the womb, mascara in hand, lipstick tattooed on their lips, waving their tainted (but bleached) pearls before the cheering drunken masses of Male-dom (who she thinks are all swine, but sleeps around with them because what good is a goddess without a worshiper?).

The congregated good-time smiles unabashedly declare prom kings and queens. The popular “in-crowd” puts everyone else on the outside by its mere existence. As the DJ sweats it out in the misty, much illuminated darkness filled with the cologne, perfume, and freshly laundered clothing, I’m not even thinking about the Prom. Insincere nudges for me to go to the prom “because it’s your Senior Prom!” never rang so false or trivial.

“Go if you want… I just don’t want you to regret not going later” rang a little clearer, a little truer, but remained off by a few octaves. At that moment, I don’t even realize that the end-all moment is happening. A blissful obliviousness must have taken over. I might have been running around my neighborhood trying to loose weight because of sneerings and jeerings that constantly bounced around my mind; it was the only reason I could come up with for so many people either loathing me or ignoring me completely. I could have been writing furiously poem after poem until I didn’t feel the pain surfacing inside me anymore.

That pain—that overextended, dry ball of cloth in my throat combined with the internal bleeding of the soul—lasted from the end of fifth grade to the beginning of my Freshman year at College. Some hands held me and bandaged me and encouraged me. Too few “good Samaritans” came my way, however, and I found that it was just after such restored faith in the world and her people, the jackals would attack me, either head on, or from the back.

Most of my life I’ve been holding onto the pain. When someone stabs you in the side, your gut reaction is not to forgive him. That feels like you’re approving the deed and want him to come back and stab your other side. Letting the gathered bitterness out of your life-jar is never easy. I want the clean refreshing of water within my soul not the acid of soul-parching sour lemons.

Yes, there will be more wounds, more healing, more things to let go. I go back to the high-school auditorium with its high-school folding seats and high-school memories and watch the performance of “You Can’t Take it with You”. Maybe not after death, but most certainly during life, we are all carriers of our precious arbitrary things. Perhaps that is why we don’t take our earthly possessions with us after death; we get so tired lugging the important, and kind-of important, and not-really important things around with us that as soon as we get released from their grasping clutches, we only want to rest in peace.

The show is over; I’m mobbed by friends remembered and friends stored back into the cob-webbed recesses of my mind. My life-jar, filled to fast, overflows… the friends wave goodbye, slowly the life-jar’s water evaporates slowly and I am taken back to a place that feels more like home than home. Worlds begin and end in a day, so we must hold on to what we have while we have it. A Tree does not give up her children leaves without fighting to her very last breath. The vivid colors must be the bleeding of her life-jar; trying to give every drop of blood to her children, she forgets herself amidst the chilling world.

I am learning, the more water I give from my life-jar, the more abundantly it flows. Vinegar no longer resides in my soul: Water, so refreshing, makes all the tribulations of the past years worth it. Forgiving the wrongs— whether the wrongdoers care, or even know they did wrong by me— and experiencing joy and hope and glistening moments of refreshing without the hindrance of malice make it all worth it; worth it all. Each day is a precious gift filled with new life, adventure, and chances to make right what was once made wrong.

There are no troubles in tomorrow; blank pages, unwritten futures, beckon the traveler on. No one knows what lies beyond the next bend in the road. Even as I write these words, in this moment, I realize that I can smile, because I am choosing my happiness, and following my bliss.