03/24/2025

There is a call from the self to the self to live free. To express that which is inside without fear. To take our hands and mold things into shapes that please us without knowing what it is we are going to make ahead of time. To whisper our secrets to the sky in the middle of the night as a solemn prayer of the heart. To feel the warmth of an embrace and let ourselves cry for the love we have shared.

Yet, we denounce our wholeness for the sake of survival. We do not laugh and we do not cry, for fear of what might happen if we do.

We believe, through our unspoken agreements with one another, that to live expressing the self in its wholeness is to be weak,
to be fragile,
to be without control. 
That vulnerability is the anthesis of strength.
That to experience pain or joy without expression is to have mastered the self and to be applauded.

We live controlled, we sleep controlled, we work controlled- for fear of chaos.
For hope of predictability.
For a false sense of safety.
But one day, we stub our toe, we forget our keys,
we accidentally send the email before it was done. We say the wrong thing to the wrong person, we let the driver who cut us off push us to a point of rage. We find a tear on our cheek in a moment of solitude.

And we denounce once again, our self within the self. We regret losing control. We fear the repercussions of what might happen now, now that we have revealed the self within.
Will they hold me accountable for what I’ve done? Will they shame me? Will they blame me? We retreat further, as punishment to the wild within, we take our hand and shove it further down our throats. Our stomachs bulging, having no place left to go.
Be safe! Be controlled!
Be weary of all, be true to none.

For you are only safe when you have no trace left of the self within you. 

You practice your regimen of suppression religiously. Instead of prayer, your god is control. Instead of hope of freedom, you hope for money. Instead of love, you hope for lust. For what else can success be other than money if it has no soul? And what else can love become without the connection of two souls? Your dreams of enlightenment are traded for lust and greed. You become the same people you used to hate without realizing it. You think only of numbers and ignore the call of greater fulfillment. 

Who can die in peace if they never let themselves run free? The more you try to quiet the call, the louder she calls. The further you try to shove her down, the heavier the bulge is to carry. It was not a revolution to cry or to love or be angry, but maybe it was.

To think of your emotions as valuable was the antidote to control. That they were there to guide you, to heal you, to make you a soul within a body. The feeling of fullness that a person experienced when living as if what they felt mattered was the antidote to greed, 
to hollow lust,
too emptiness.

The Angels know this, they nudge us along our paths. They are the tear you mistakenly found upon your cheek and the rage that swelled within your chest. 

No one ever believed that to feel was holy, but it was our divine right- it was the proof of our existence that we all craved. It was the soul alive within the body. Feeling it all and reporting back to us what something meant to us.

It was not a call to anarchy but to peace. For an emotion expressed in the moment it was felt was an emotion no longer capable of destruction. It was the big release of the weight we all carried. And once released, it was always followed by a hope renewed.

At last, I realized my hopelessness was just a symptom of suppression. And joy could be mine if only I let myself feel it all.