Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are always harsher...

I have a hard time dealing with people.

For anyone who knows me, or who has read my thoughts here contained, this should not be shocking news. I’m startlingly inept in social situations, and routinely fail to see things that most other people take for granted. When walking through a crowd, I treat others as moving objects to be avoided in my traverse from point ‘A’ to point ‘B,’ and am genuinely astonished when one of them speaks to me. Typically, I am caught off guard and have to take a few seconds to comprehend what is going on before I’m on top of my mind enough to summon up a response, even to something as mundane as ‘hi.’

To say that my mental agility fails me at inopportune times would be an understatement. Once, a few years ago, my brother and I were browsing in a department store for a gift, when a gorgeous brunette from behind a perfume counter stopped us and looked square into my face and asked whether she knew me, or whether she’d met me somewhere before. After standing in silence with my mouth open for some ten seconds or so while the wheels in my head furiously turned in their feverish race to nowhere, my brother chimed in to help out, telling the girl what high school I had attended and volunteering that I was (at the time) attending the University of Kansas. The girl brushed both of those comments aside with a shake of her head, extended her hand to me, and introduced herself. Still in shock, I shook her hand, failed immediately to even so much as hear her name, confirmed that I didn’t think we knew each other, said goodbye, and proceeded to walk right out the door, in awe that a woman would deign to speak to me. It wasn’t until we were out in the parking lot that my brother, dumbfounded, asked me to explain what the hell I was thinking. When I finally realized that this girl might have actually been interested in me, I was far too embarrassed about what she surely saw as a snub to return to the store.

I have noticed that I am that sort of person who could be described as turtle-esque. If that isn’t a real word, then it is now. I tend to take unconscious, painstaking steps to keep people at arms’ length. I’m not the sort to leap into social situations, and due to my grave and crippling self-doubts, usually find hasty ways to extricate myself from those situations when I unwittingly find myself immersed therein.

When I was at the University of Kansas, I lived for the first semester of my academic career in a large campus housing complex. This hall included all of the amenities one might expect from a building of its grandeur, including strange odors, discolored spots on the carpeting, dim lighting, and perpetually-broken elevators (Have you ever tried moving all of your earthly possessions up eight flights of stairs? Yikes.). My food, three meals each day, was provided by the dining hall located near the building. I ate each and every single one of those meals throughout the semester without skipping a single meal, and I ate every single one of those meals alone. There were dozens and dozens of tables in this dining center, and unless you were eating at the particularly busy hours (which I rarely did), most tables were less than half full. I never sat at one of those tables with other students…not once, in the entire semester.

The same is true in virtually every single context in which I have ever found myself. Left by myself, I will remain that way.

As I mentioned before, I have noticed that I am the type of person who is turtle-esque. I have thought that about myself before, but never had a satisfying answer about why I had such a difficult time relating to people as people, or why I couldn’t just open up with others the way that it seems other people could. I just finished watching my copy of “The Virgin Suicides,” and for the first time heard – really heard – the last lines of the movie. The narrator, reflecting back on how he and his friends had dealt with the deaths of his neighbors, the five young sisters whose story is encompassed by the title of the film, says this: “So much has been said about the girls over the years, but we have never found an answer. It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling – still do not hear us calling - them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

The final lines of this film made me realize something that seems so immediately obvious when I think it that I should have figured it out long ago. Caring about people hurts. It can really hurt a lot, and when you face that kind of pain, it is natural to try to find a way to shield yourself from it in any way that you can. My pain is the pain of loss.

It seems as if the things about which I care are almost always taken from me in some form or another, usually by the hands of time, sometimes in the nature of normal life and human relationships, but sometimes by my own folly and error. When my parents moved from south-central Kansas to Topeka, I was in the third grade and had to leave all of my friends behind. I have watched helplessly as my first pet and companion, Lollipop the poodle, was put to sleep. All of my little stuffed animals, on whom I lavished so much affection, were taken and packed away in a box. I have lost a girl I adored to cancer when we were very young. A best friend of mine killed himself in high school. My grandmother accidentally poisoned to death all three dozen of our pet birds. Most of my friends went away to far off colleges. My brother left Kansas and moved halfway across the country to start his life in another place. My adorable little dog, Mitzi the Yorkshire Terrier, shook as I had her euthanized after an incapacitating stroke. I somehow fire off my ‘woman-friend repulsing weapon’ without knowing how, and end up alone again. The man that I respect only second to my brother dies from a most improbable form of cancer. Two more of my companions, my parents’ pet dogs (Pinkie and Kee) who have been with me since elementary school are old and will likely soon die or have to be put to sleep as well.

Caring about people can be a painful experience. When life deals me – or when I deal myself – a harsh blow from the loss of something I considered beautiful, I harden my shell just a little bit more and allow the pain of it to bounce off of my armor. Unfortunately, this is ultimately dehumanizing me, and dehumanizing how I see those around me.

This blog has been largely a journey of self-discovery, but underneath that inwardly focused journey has been an outwardly focused effort. I have revealed things of which I am ashamed, things that made my blood boil in fury, things which made me weep inconsolably, and things which made me float on clouds of euphoria. I have made every attempt that I felt I could to strip away my armored plates to reveal the vulnerable parts inside. By revealing myself to people I know (and even to strangers), I’m trying to fling out small pieces of myself in an attempt to find someone who will hold onto one, nurture it, and bring it back to me.

When you care about someone – in any meaningful way - that you then lose… well, it just makes me wonder whether my strategy to open myself up was the wisest course of action.

Earlier today, I listened to some music while I studied for an upcoming final for my summer courses (always a bad idea since I tend to listen to the music more than study). One line from a song really caught my ear.

“I quit. I’m done.
‘Cause I don’t think it’s going to turn out okay.
It’s no fair. It’s no fun.
‘Cause every time it’s going to end the same way.
Me = zero, Big Fat World = 1.”

I’m hoping that laying aside my armor is the right thing to do, because that hope seems to grow just a little bit thinner every time I lose.

Potentially graphic (you've been warned)

The more I introspect, the more I sometimes wonder whether I will ever truly understand myself. Looking back on what I have written in this virtual journal, I like to believe that I have made some smallish strides in figuring out exactly who I am underneath the person that I show to the rest of the world. While I like to think that this is so, every time that I think that I might finally understand myself, I uncover mysteries anew for which I am at a loss to explain.

I am currently enrolled in a summer law class entitled “Bioethics and the Law.” The course is tailor made to suit some of my most cherished academic areas of interest. Discussing issues like abortion, stem-cell research, cloning, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide are my bread and butter while within the walls of my ivory tower. Although the class’ material is fascinating to me, I have come to a very odd conclusion about myself as I am experiencing the material of the class – I am quite nearly immune from feeling empathy for other people through description alone.

The text for the class involves discussions of medical issues which are truly quite terrible. There are infants which are born with a disorder known as anencephaly (which literally means ‘no head’). These infants usually have a head and face, but for some reasons have failed to develop a cerebrum (the large variegated chunk of your brain that makes up about 70% of the organ). The cerebrum is the part of your brain responsible for all of your cognitive processes. The infants usually still retain the ability to have a heart beat, regulate their internal temperature, digest food, blink, and breathe, since some basic parts of their brains (the brain stem and cerebellum) are frequently still intact. However, the child will never see the world around it, hear sounds, smell or taste objects near it, or feel the touch of another person. These infants in some cases cannot actually perceive pain. There are couples out there this very night who will give birth to a living being for whom they have waited for nine months or longer, who will realize with dismay that the fragile child that they have birthed is purely vegetative.

There are adults tonight who, as devout members of the Church of Christ, Scientist (who reject all medical care), will refuse their small child medications that would save that child’s life, preferring to pray to their God over the child as a way to make him better. The child will die, screaming in pain and discomfort, while his parents whisper their words into the sky beside him. The child’s suffering is heard by few, and in many states cannot be rectified by law (lots of states prohibit neglect and abuse claims from being brought for actions of Christian Scientists or other faith healers). There are cases where these children have bled to death under the watchful eye of their parents, and as their precious life’s blood seeps away, their cries grow fainter and fainter, until at last, their body begins to shut down from lack of oxygen.

The text tells me of the nature of partial birth abortion procedures, in which the cervix of a pregnant woman is dilated and the fetus carried within her turned and brought through the cervix feet first (breeching), so that the head of the fetus remains inside her womb. The head of the fetus will then usually be punctured, the cranial contents (the developing brain) scrambled and sucked out via a vacuum pump, the fetus disarticulated (dismembered), and the tiny body removed.

None of these descriptions elicits from me the slightest disgust or revulsion. Some of them raise my ire. Some cause me to contemplate the nature of life, what precisely we find precious about it, and whether that quality is found within various entities above. In none of these cases, does my emotional trigger reach a breaking point, causing me to treat this as other than a purely clinical description.

At the same time, though, my emotional responses do engage over the harms and pains dealt out by humans to many non-human animals. Perhaps a year and a half ago, I read a story concerning some youths in Canada who had tied a housecat to a barn rafter via a long rope. They took a stick and beat the cat like a piñata. While the cat meowed and screamed, they took a knife and partially skinned it. With careful (almost surgical) precision, they sliced open its stomach, allowing its entrails to spill out. When at last these youths had had their fun, they slit the cat’s throat and let it bleed to death onto the barn below. As if this weren’t bad enough, the youths videotaped the entire escapade, so that they would be able to relive the experience by watching it again.

When I read the news story about that encounter, I was livid for days. I felt physically ill. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I always used to think that the phrase ‘seeing red’ just meant that you were angry. I hadn’t ever realized that it described an actual and very real state of anger. I was filled with a restless energy and paced around my room, other people’s rooms, and the halls of my school, at once angry and profoundly grieving for the loss of a single housecat in such a brutal fashion.

Three days ago, the same emotions were stirred in me once again. It appears that a man living in Great Britain took it upon himself to play ‘Vet’ with a dog who has been his faithful companion. His dog had been hit by a truck, and one of its forepaws injured. The man did not pay for a veterinarian to fix his dog’s leg, but rather spread a tarp in his kitchen, heated an iron bar to glowing on his stove, used an electric turkey carver to amputate his dog’s leg, and then cauterized the wound with the iron bar. To suggest that this is an acceptable practice is the height of barbarism, and calls to mind scenes from the movie ‘Glory’ in which civil war doctors are seen (in silhouette) amputating a man’s leg with an ordinary wood saw, while holding him down. I recall his screams more than I recall the dialogue which was spoken in the foreground while this occurred behind. I can't imagine that the dog screamed any less forcefully.

For most of my life, I have empathized with non-human animals' plights. Humans inflict terrible pains and suffering on our slightly less gifted cousins, some of which have crossed the line into the realm of devilish tortures. I can't bring myself to squish bugs, and honestly cried one night in college after attending a party where the hosts had used as centerpieces small glasses of water with goldfish in them (the goldfish could barely move, and most were dead by night's end from lack of oxygen... or being swallowed, alive and squirming, by drunken college boys who should have known that the fish would be dissolved alive in their stomach acid). I have occasionally given consideration to the idea of entering the field of ‘animal law,’ which would allow me to argue cases about the rights of non-human animals and try to find ways to protect them from the horrors that we inflict upon them for what seem like fairly unconvincing reasons. I have long maintained that many of our non-human animal companions on this planet are in possession of those faculties which make our own lives so precious. Some can think as well as our own children, solve complex problems in novel ways suggesting insight into physical relationships like cause-and-effect, engage in deliberate deception and truth-telling, and have hopes and dreams for their futures. Some, like Washoe (the sign-language using Chimpanzee) even appear capable of feeling profound emotional responses to things around her. I’m too lazy to go look up the passage in a book I read recently (if you are curious about it yourself, check out “Drawing the Line” by Steven Wise), but a Chimpanzee in Washoe’s enclosure was pregnant, and Washoe was excited about the coming of the baby. When the pregnant chimpanzee was taken away for birthing, Washoe repeatedly approached her trainers to ask where the baby was and when it would arrive. The other chimpanzee returned after a miscarriage, and Washoe excitedly asked the returning chimpanzee about her baby to which the mother said “Baby gone.” Washoe repeated “Baby gone” a few times in disbelief, and then signed “I’m sorry” to her friend from the enclosure.

To treat all non-human animals as property is no less an affront to liberty than is treating as property our fellow human beings. To treat them not only as property, but as property which we can feel free to destroy or harm at will is not only an affront to liberty, but an assault on the very fabric of decency.

How, though, can I empathize with someone so different from myself (a chimpanzee, a housecat, or a man's dog), when I have a very hard time empathizing with others of my own species? Am I callous for not caring as deeply as I ought for human suffering or am I too empathetic for mourning over the loss of non-human animals?

How could such a good start go so wrong?

Serenity.

For some people, this will bring to mind a quiet brook, gently babbling over rocks in a depression filled with grass of a quite vibrant shade of green. For others, it will cause them to envision a slow massage by knowing hands lit only by the flickering glow of a candle.

As for me, I think of a spaceship and the loss of something great.

Quite some time back, a friend of mine introduced me to the television series “Firefly” which had a half-season run on Fox before being canceled. I’m not big on most television shows. In fact, when it comes to spending my money on DVD entertainment, I’m a mite hesitant to spend it on something that comes in episodes. To say that I’m skeptical of episodic television as a legitimate medium for telling compelling stories is surely an understatement.

Why? The answer is simple – it is very difficult to tell a story that needs telling in the space of a half-hour. It is easy to build the typical sitcom. Throw some wacky one-dimensional characters into a room together and let the hijinks ensue. Action sequences, and simple-minded jokes may be entertaining for a spell, but they get mighty old, mighty fast.

In the show “Firefly,” I found something that I thought was worthy of being seen… stories that deserved to be told. The episodic nature of it still bothers me, but running deeply underneath the brief hour-long vignettes ran a very emotional and intense journey into the hearts of human relationships. Each character had a history that humanized them, hopes and dreams, fears, and secrets that they weren’t quite ready to reveal. It was a humbling experience to realize that I actually cared about some of the fictional characters. No matter how much you may want them to win a contest, no singer on a stage or pretend businessperson in a boardroom can command your heartstrings or strip away the carefully tended defenses we all erect to keep the vulnerable parts of us hidden away.

Yet, this is precisely what the series “Firefly” did, and did on a masterful level that I’ve only rarely seen in television or cinema. The series was a case-study in varying types of powerful love that can exist between people. There existed an undercurrent of selfless and protective sibling love, newly blossoming and still tentative love, tragic and unspoken love, and playful and well-established love between a married couple, along with many other forms of friendship, care, and compassion to boot.

While my praise for the series is quite high, there exists a dark side to this story known as the movie, “Serenity.” Created as a way to cash in on the growing popularity of a television show that never made it through a season, “Serenity” did what I thought no movie could possibly do. It killed “Firefly.”

“Serenity” was not a movie driven by the force of the characters that inhabited the world. Instead, it was a low-quality action film with more than enough explosions, aerial dogfights, and gun battles to fill up a sizeable portion of the movie. Secrets that were closely held throughout the full 14 episodes of “Firefly” were revealed without fanfare on “Serenity.”

There are people who like to not know the answers to mysteries, finding that the solution inevitably robs the mystery of its beauty and power. I am not one of those people. I am the guy that not only wants to know the answer to the questions, but denies that the mysteries are somehow beautiful in and of themselves. However, revealing the secrets all at once seems vulgar and hurried. Whereas the television show languorously revealed the delicious truths that I wanted to know, the movie version simply ripped the secrets out into the open making me wonder why they needed to be hidden in the first place. Think of it like disrobing in front of a lover… There may be some added ardor for the things that are hidden when they aren’t simply handed out from the beginning for free.

Perhaps one of my largest problems with the movie version of the show that I found so compelling was that it altered so much of what I found truly compelling about the show to begin with. In the television show, characters each wrestled with various internal dilemmas and external relational dilemmas which defined their roles within the small community of the ship. The character of Malcolm Reynolds was a paragon of chaotic goodness (see a DND character typing chart for explanation) – the equivalent of the roguish Robin Hood – complete with all of the hallmark traits of people that live in that mindset. He was carefree, willing to meet people on his terms, and always seeking to live his own life freely. In the television show, he epitomized this archetype by commenting that no matter how long the arm of the alliance (his enemies) got, he could just fly his ship a little farther away. As said by Henry the V in Shakespeare’s play, he did not seek a fight, but neither would he shun one if it came to him. In the movie version, he ceased to be the carefree and independent rogue with clever banter and instead became a serious man on a mission, willing to die in his attempt to win. Where did the restless space cowboy go and who was this dark, brooding David seeking his Goliath?

The character of Simon Tam always resonated strongly with me (perhaps because we are both such lawful characters at heart). Simon’s character was gifted in his field of medicine and could deal with human beings in incredible ways… so long as they weren’t actually humans to him. The moment that he is forced to deal with people qua people, rather than people qua objects, he falls apart. He is madly head-over-heels in love with a woman who loves him, but can’t find a way to tell her even when she’s dropping hints to him left and right. His shy, boyish charm and hopelessness when it comes to being brave are part of what made his character so compelling. The movie version radically altered this as well. Instead of the inwardly strong, but outwardly weak character that I had come to know and find so compelling, I found a man with a strong spine, ready to stand up to the captain of the ship (or anybody else that crossed his path, for that matter).

What’s just as bad is that the people that made the movie version even sacrificed Simon Tam’s lawfulness. Simon’s character on the television series was always concerned about propriety, and while he may want to show his more-than-friendly affection for the character of Kaylee, he finds that he can’t because of the social roles that each is expected to play. At one point, Kaylee sadly remarks to Simon that he shouldn’t always have to worry about being so proper, because out at the edges of civilization, it doesn’t really matter quite so much. Simon’s response is the hallmark of lawfulness when he sadly replies back that, in fact, out at the edges of civilization, it matters even more. Simon’s love for Kaylee is made difficult by his commitment to lawful good and hers to chaotic good in the television series, but in the movie, they simply did away with Simon’s lawfulness (thus negating his entire backstory and conflict) and had him sleep with Kaylee at the end. If Simon is to keep his character from series to big screen, he should have ended the movie by legitimizing his relationship with Kaylee by asking her to marry him, not heading off for a romp in the ships bunkroom.

And then, of course, there is the Kaylee character. I identified myself with the Simon character, and found myself developing a faux-crush on the character of Kaylee, just as surely as did the Simon character. In the television series, Kaylee couldn’t be captured by a word any less than the following: joy. As the ship’s mechanic, she frequently gets dirty (something that both the Simon character and I usually dislike), but on Kaylee, it somehow looked right. Kaylee reminded me a lot of a girl that I used to know (one of the few Miss Perfects out there). I wrote about her once before and remarked that the beautiful thing about her wasn’t that she saw the silver linings on all of the dark clouds, but rather that she simply didn’t see the dark clouds to begin with. Well, the Kaylee character took that mentality and ran with it, and as much as it probably reflects poorly on me, I love it. I’m a sucker for sweetness and cuteness, and any woman in real life who could bat gigantic doe-eyes at me like that… Well, let’s just say that it would set my heart a’fluttering. The movie version stripped most of the force of her character away, though, and made her simply a sex-starved secondary character with few lines. Just like Mal and Simon, Kaylee had been so radically altered as to be an entirely different character with very little in common with the character who touched my heart in the television series.

Nearly on par with the destruction the movie version visited on the quite powerful love story between Kaylee and Simon was the seemingly random loss of two very powerful characters from the television series. One of the passengers on board the ship Serenity was a quiet man who went by the name of Book. Book is a religious figure (his title is ‘Shepard’) and seems a quiet and unassuming preacher/monk. Virtually nothing is known of his history, though, and the mystery surrounding him grows more and more palpable as the television episodes progress. He is clearly a man with a quiet and contemplative wisdom, but knows/does things that a clergyman simply ought not to know or do (quickly identifying types of weapons, being a handy shot with powerful guns, identifying enemy fightercraft, and being in possession of an ID card which grants him immediate access to enemy alliance resources while being treated with utmost respect). In the final episode, a bounty hunter who seems to know everything about the crew of the ship even casually remarks that Book isn’t a Shepard at all.

For absolutely no apparent reason, Shepard Book practically spills his secret in the movie version, which makes the mysterious wanderer character far from compelling. What’s even more bizarre is that he is summarily killed off for little reason. Trying to top itself on the ‘who can make the most wacky production choices’ scale, the movie even has him being killed off (well, nearly killed off) while his character is entirely offscreen.

Finally, I have to address the burning issue that has been screaming at me in the back of my head while I’ve written the rest of this quasi-review. “Serenity” killed off Wash! While I identified myself with the character of Simon Tam, in the entirety of the television series I really felt connected to two of the characters on the ship. I don’t hide the fact that one of them is the mechanic Kaylee. Kaylee’s character is so sweet and innocent that it is hard not to want to be the hero to rush to her rescue when she bats her doe-like eyes. The second character, though, is the pilot of the ship, Wash. Wash’s character is the paramount example of the grown man who never gave up being a little boy. Treating every day like he’s on a vacation, when everyone else is dressed in leathers and work clothes, Wash is in a Hawaiian shirt. In the first scene from the television series where you see him, he is sitting at his control station in the ship, surrounded by blinking lights, readout panels, and a sort of sensor screen (which he is supposed to be watching for incoming alliance ships), but what is he doing? He’s playing with plastic dinosaur toys, complete with dialogue for them, and an apparently epic battle between an herbivorous Stegasaur and the wily betrayer, the T-Rex. Just like Kaylee, Wash seems to be the classic example of simple goodness. He’s the sort of guy that you’d love to have as a best friend or roommate. He’s insanely talented, but you just know that given the opportunity, he would spend every day playing with plastic dinosaurs and the like.

When the movie is nearly finished, after Wash has just piloted the ship through a warzone (with ships and ordnance exploding all around him), he crash lands the ship on a planet. As he exults in the fact that they all made it to the ground, for seemingly no good reason, he is suddenly impaled. That’s right – impaled. A gigantic spear or bolt fired from a spaceship (that has somehow landed right in front of the window he is facing without anybody noticing) flies through the windshield of the cockpit, and impales Wash. He’s instantly killed. Aside from his wife being overcome by battlelust during a fight just moments later, his death has absolutely no impact on the remaining story. If all you saw was the movie version, you never even got to know the Wash character, since he had very few lines, and was relegated to a very one-dimensional role as talented pilot. For someone like me who enjoyed the Wash character, his sudden (and pointless) death should have merited a little bit of grieving time to make his death poignant and give full effect to his loss. We were denied even that in the movie.

I’m always one who can come up with tragic endings to stories, and I revel in my own sense of tragedy from time to time (much to the aggravation of others, I know). But in the Firefly television series, my favorite characters were Simon and Kaylee, Wash, and Book. Of the four of them, two end up dead for no apparently valuable reasons for the story, and the other two of them are so radically different as characters that I couldn’t find their story nearly as powerful or touching.

Serenity? Hardly. This movie brings me nothing but discontent.

Urban Cowboy?

There’s an old saying that says something to the effect of, “If you fall off of a horse, then you get right back on.” I’ve never been much of a person to put much stock into old saying and aphorisms, and I generally find that they are often empty platitudes that people mouth to sound smarter than they actually are. There’s something about this particular saying, though, that resonates with me a bit.

I’ve always been a coward. I don’t enjoy admitting that fact, and I’m not a big fan of saying it outloud (or putting it down into black and white for anyone in the world to read). When times get tough, I frequently cut and run. I’d like to be the kind of guy who stands his ground, but I’m the first to break for cover when things are looking grim.

True to form, I’ve run away from my writing. When I first started this journal of my thoughts, I intended it to be almost a sort of therapeutic enterprise, where I could muse on things that occupied my days, and within some fairly narrow limits, explore certain aspects of myself in order to better control the things inside me that I’d rather not let out.

With my uncle’s passing, many of those demons demanded some time to breathe the fresh air, and in the spirit of being somewhat healthy in my catharsis, I allowed them to do their work, and I grieved. I told myself that I ought to be stronger than this… that death was simply a natural process that comes as an inevitable eventuality on account of living in the first place. I believed that, but still I grieved.

I fled from my grief. I fled from my friends. I fled from my virtual pen and the solace I sometimes find in its exercise. I’m sorry for the first because it means that I will have another small demon buried inside, clamoring for his freedom, and I’ll have to find some way to slowly release him so as not to allow him to overtake me. I’m sorry for the second because there are people out there (3 friends: 1 real-life and two virtual) who seem to legitimately worry about me, who appear to care for me, and I denied their help when it was freely offered even though I needed it. I’m sorry for the last because I have neglected to tend to something that I find important to me - telling a story… my story – to someone who lived it but who never took the time to actually comprehend the things that happened around him. I like to think that by using this canvas to paint the things inside my head, that I have grown some in my understanding of how I work, what might be wrong with me, and how to make me a little better than I am right now.

Fleeing from thought of any variety is a dangerous path for me to take, because while I find it very easy to go down certain paths, I also find it extraordinarily hard for me to reverse direction and walk back up those same paths. An apology may not seem like much from many people, and it may look as if I give them out like candy, but admitting that I am wrong is like reversing myself back up one of those paths, and it takes a lot of mental stamina for me to do. I need to start writing again.

After all, that horse isn’t going to wait around forever.