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"I've only lived 18 years, but I don't want to change any of them. They're all part of my life, even the failures." -Makise Kurisu
So quick side note before we get started, I fucking love Digimon. I watched the various shows religiously as a kid and I've gotten back into it with the most recent two games (which are outstanding and great turned based RPG games) so that's where the idea for this series of blogs comes from. In the original show there are eight crests representing eight values, Courage, Friendship, Love, Knowledge, Sincerity, Reliability, Hope, and Light (they are also my newest necklace set because why not). The last one not so much a value in the traditional sense, but can still be interpreted as such. So I thought in the middle of class today, hey I like sharing the thoughts in my head (here and here) and I've definitely have thoughts on these so why not right about them? I'm going to go in order listed above so without further ado let's talk about courage.
Courage is a weird thing. A courageous act to one person can be seen as a reckless/stupid one to another and sometimes to a third person as a cowardly one. Let's look as this example. Say you see a friend in trouble, whether it's physical, verbal, emotional, whatever someone you know is in trouble in someway shape or form and you know trying to help them will but you in danger as well, what's the courageous thing to do? Do you go and help them even though you might get hurt as well. but isn't that a reckless action that could make the situation worse? Okay so you instead go get someone better suited to handle the situation because your recognize that you aren't the best person to handle this situation, well now you're possibly leaving a friend alone and walking away you coward. Maybe the situation is that your friend is doing something illegal. Is the courageous thing to confront them upfront about it or to tell the authorities. Well now aren't you either butting into a situation you aren't involved in or being a snitch and possibly ruining a friends life or at the very least their faith and trust in you. So what in the hell is courage? To me courage is all of that. It's helping and not helping a friend. It's confronting a friend about a problem or telling the people that need to know. It's making the tough decisions that no one else can, will, or wants to make. It's recognizing when you need to swallow your pride and confront a part of you head on. It's admitting you're not equipped to handle a situation and getting someone who can. It's choosing to help someone when no one else can or will. Courage is admitting you need help and you aren't invincible. Courage is admitting you are losing against your inner demons and asking for help. Courage is admitting you can be wounded and need a pick me up. Courage is talking about the shit going wrong in your life. Courage is asking for help. Courage is not holding all of that in. Courage is not shouldering the world. Courage is not fighting by yourself. Courage is not taking everything on by yourself so other people don't deal with your baggage. Courage is in all of us. Even small bits. It comes out when it needs to know, but not always when we want it to. Running isn't cowardice, admitting you need help isn't weak, saying that I'm not strong enough for this isn't pathetic. Courage isn't black and white. A courageous act by one person in a different scenario could be seen as a reckless one. A courageous act can be as small asking that person out, admitting you need to go back to school, admitting you aren't as happy as you make yourself out to be, or admitting you took on too much at once and you need to drop something.
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Today has been an interesting day. Yeah, interesting is the best word for it. My original plan today was to hangout with my best friend and watch Your Lie in April and absolutely fantastic anime about a child piano prodigy. She unfortunately wasn't feeling well so I used today to get some stuff done and just be by myself. It's been a while since I've done that. Between work, family, school, and my friends I haven't just been by myself for awhile now and I didn't realize just how much I needed that. I was able to recharge my mental and emotional batteries and listened to a lot of slower and more somber songs. One of which being The Real Me by Andrew Stein.
This song has always resonated with me. At some points in my life more so than others, but today was the first time it really sank in. There are very few people that i would consider that I'm truly myself with. I would imagine that's true for most everyone though. We all act differently depending on the situation. From school to family to work to the general public everyone dons a different persona to make interactions go as smoothly as possible. I'm no different. At the same time though wouldn't it be appropriate to say we constantly reject a certain aspect of ourselves at any given moment? At any point in time we feel we have to repress a part of our true self to fit into the environment we find ourselves in. Which would also lead to the conclusion that people are very rarely their true selves. Take me for instance. Most people would say I'm rather shy and quiet in school. I don't speak out in class too often and when I do it's usually quick and short blurbs. When I'm with my family, every single word I say is calculated. Before I even begin to speak I run through my head every possible scenario that could stem from what I'm about to say. When I'm with my friends I will shout out any little thing that comes to mind and not care what the hell happens afterward. When I'm by myself I think about this kind of stuff and usually torture myself over all the little shit I did wrong in the past week. So when can someone truly be themselves? When can anyone show every last shred of their personality and being? If I only knew. My best friend is the person I am the closest too and she has gotten the closest to seeing the "real me", but even she hasn't seen everything and it's getting more and more tiring to keep up all of this different masks. I'm tired of keeping quiet, of constantly planning everything I say, of not being able to show my friends a part of me that's becoming more and more important. I'm also terrified of what will happen. What if I say something in class that get's spread throughout campus, what if a off handed remark leads to a fight with my sister's and I say things I can't take back? What if the rest of my friends aren't as accepting and I lose them? At the very least I know the last one is nothing to worry about, but fear is a force that can paralyze the best of us. With the holidays coming closer I've been thinking a lot about family lately. The necessity of it, the reasons for having it, the reasons for keeping it, and so on and so forth. I've come to the realization that there is more than just one kind of family. I have three in fact. Three distinct families that have made me into the person I am today, Three different families that if it weren't for them I wouldn't be here today.
The first one is obviously my birth family. With a mom and dad (this year was their 25th anniversary in fact) two older sisters and a older half-brother needless to say that alone time isn't generally in abundance, at least in the traditional sense. I'm without a doubt the proverbial black sheep of the family not for any bad reasons mind you. I've never had any interest in sports while my dad and two sisters go crazy every Sunday night. My oldest sister Nicole (yes I know how close our names are) is following in my mom's footsteps and working in the medical field. My brother is currently working with my dad at his construction company, which I've tried doing several times and it's always ended with us yelling at each other. Even when they're not doing something together most night they all usually spend at least a few hours just sitting in the family room with the occasional mild chatter. I on the other hand am usually sitting by myself in the basement. It's where my whole set up is, all of my gaming consoles, my computer, and all of my stuff. As it is my bedroom is only used for sleeping. I'm in the same house, I'm still a part of the family, and I've never felt unloved, but if I'm not out with friends I feel alone in that basement. My only interaction with my family most days is when they need to me run something up or down the basement steps. Despite all of that I know they have my back when I need them. In the end they are still my family, not matter how different I feel, no matter how lonely I might get, no matter how far I'll inevitably move away, I know that they'll always be there for me. My second family is my "created family", my friends. The best way to describe them would an eclectic group to say the least. Half of us from Springfield, half from Ridley, and few from just around. I've always felt that this kind of family is the hardest to maintain, but the most rewarding when you do. The only thing keeping a group like mine to together is a sense of mutual acceptance, liking, and shared interest. If any one person stops feeling like any of those three aspects are true it's easy enough for them to find a group of like minded individuals to hang out with. There's no traditional sense of family that says that just because we share the same parents or one gave birth to another that we have to stick it out through the bullshit. There's no memories of growing up in the same house to together. The only thing keeping friends together is the mutual agreement to do so. That's also why I think friends are the strongest connection you can have. At any point I can choose to walk away from them and the same goes for them, but even through everything that has happened, that is happening, and that will happen I've been lucky enough to surround myself with people that will always be there for me because they want to be. What keeps my group together is the sense of family that can only come from when you make a true connection with people and really open yourself up to them. The sense that the person who's shoulder you're crying on is there not because of some obligation they fell that they have, but because they genuinely care about you. The sense that the fun you're having on a Friday night and the camaraderie you feel won't still be there when you look back on that memory in ten years. This is the most fragile type of family by far, but it can also be the strongest connection you can have with any group. My third family is one I haven't spoken to in a while, but that doesn't matter because I know I'll be welcomed back when I can eventually afford my subscription again. My Free Company Harmonium in the MMO Final Fantasy XIV. I know none of their real names. I know the country some of them live in and even some of the states for my more 'local' clan mates. I know two of them work with horses, I know a few of them are in college, I know back when I first joined I was the youngest member at age seventeen. I know so little about all of them, but they are still family to me. When a gamer finds a guild they synchronize with, a group of people that they have some kind of other world connection with it's hard to look away from. Now families two and three can very easily overlap, I've never had the chance to do so, but I know a couple of people that have met with online friend in real life. The distinction comes from when they are separate entities. Close nit guilds in any game can be the family people go to to escape their real life families. It's the feel of escapism that games can give people while also giving them a group of people to escape to. I love all of my families, even the ones I don't get to visit as often as I would like. They all have helped shape me into who I am and they've all helped keep me here, whether or not they know it. Friends are important. Your hobbies are important. Family is essential. Links:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Biography Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) The Yellow Wallpaper (Audio Text) The Yellow Wallpaper Rewrite For this one I was tasked with rewriting a part from The Yellow Wallpaper, I choose the ending, and writing about a time where someone's else actions impacted be negatively. So I decided to write about the last New Years Eve party I went to and how the eventually led to the end of a friendship. In all honesty in probably was for the better, but the months leading up to my friends and I finally saying we had enough were freaking rough and I still lost a friend. He wasn't a good friend by any stretch of the word, but it's still a sad thing to lose someone in your life. A Negative Impact Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time! Thankfully Jane soon found the two of us, but she was so cross with me for tearing up that horrid yellow wallpaper all she could do was weep and wake up John. I tried to talk to them but no matter what I said they wouldn’t even acknowledge me. They did a curious thing though. They cleaners come to the house. On the day right before we leave? I thought it rather strange but decide to pay them no mind like they’ve been doing to me. We had one very simple rule to follow that New Year’s Eve. Don’t let the parents know who’s underage. It’s the most obvious thing to do when you’re drinking underage at someone else’s house. Those that drove that night left our wallets in our respective cars and those that didn’t drive just didn’t bring them. It’s was supposed to be so simple, but we didn’t account for the dumbass that was John. Now this guy has done absolutely idiotic stuff in the past (if I could share half the stories), but this was just stupid. So, a bunch of people are at this person’s house for New Year’s Eve and just a quick side note, this person’s house is just a what the hell am I even looking at kind of house. The hedges out front was cut into irregular shapes, trapezoids, pyramids, and the like, and the house itself looked like a giraffe. The outside tile was randomly designed light brown tiles randomly placed at odd distances and patterns with thick cream white concrete running throughout. Any way let’s jump to a little past 11pm and the party is in full swing. Drunken karaoke is happening in the living room, the hottest songs of the year being slurred out. Fighting games are being played a few rooms down with cheers and boos echoing throughout the house. The food that was prepared has been thoroughly destroyed by this point. Now during the whole party, the parents of the house have been keeping watch and making sure nothing got too out of hand and for some reason John though it was a smart idea to pull out his wallet and leave it out in the open. Now I can’t blame his parents for looking at his ID. With a house full of young twenty somethings some of which are known to be underage and aren’t drinking, I can understand wanting to make sure the law is being upheld so that nothing can come back to bite them in the ass. So, he got barred from ever coming back to that house, the party immediately ended, those that were drinking were the only ones allowed to stay the night, and a lot of the friendships he had at the party took a big hit. Now how did this all affect me I can hear you asking. I had to deal with the god damn aftermath from all of this. A good number of those friendships he fucked up were my friends and I. The coming months he got more and more toxic towards us because he felt we were “being unfair” about the whole situation. The amount of drunk texts and calls I got from him either begging for forgiveness or cursing me out is too much to even count. Our weekly Dungeons and Dragons game would turn into us either making sure he didn’t drink himself sick or get so high he passed out. He would never want to hangout anywhere else other than his house because if we did he wouldn’t be able to drink or smoke… I also think it’s because he wanted to have control. Thankfully we soon had enough and went our separate ways. I did learn a very important lesson from all of this. Toxic friends are not worth keeping, there’s only so much reasoning and discussion you can have with a person before you have to decide that they’re never going to change and you’re better off without them. John’s behavior wasn’t anything new, but the New Years Ever brought it into clarity. |
Nick D'AversaWriter, outstandingly good at mouthing along to songs, level 9 Dragonborn Blood Hunter, and just trying to figure out what in the hell I'm doing. Archives
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