When all you have isn’t enough, then what?

When everything you are isn’t good enough, then what will be good enough?

When your entire history is poured on the ground and the only thing you can make is mud pies, should you plan to forever go hungry?

Someone once said to me, “You won’t live to thirty”. Yet here I am I lived past fifty.

Someone else once said to me, “I will kill you”. Yet, here I am alive. They didn’t succeed in killing me though they damned near broke my spirit.

Another person said to me, “You will never amount to anything, you are stupid”. I believed them for years and let their judgment dictate my direction and choices.

I approach my next birthday, sooner than I like to think and I consider the consequences of my choices. Pardon me while I wallow in a fair bit of self-pity, maybe not self-pity so much as ‘well shit, what next’. I stare down this slope of the unknown and consider options:

–          What is next for this last third of my life?

–          Why am I asking who I am at this late date?

–          Should I even care about definition or instead just get to living as best I can?

If you could, would you say despite not being enough, not being good enough, despite dust turning only to mud, I am still grateful. My heart is full of gratitude I have lived, I am alive and my eyes have beheld great beauty, my soul has burst with laughter and I have trod paths both new and ancient searching for nothing more than passages to joy. I have risked my heart more than once, because well because I am a romantic and despite I have had the ever-loving shit stomped out of me more than once I still believe in love. Despite a tough as nails exterior, despite scars, not just on the inside but some prominent ones on the outside, I am still somewhat mushy and sometimes all too forgiving of the failure of others to take care of the gifts I freely give.

I often accept hurtful words and judgments of ‘less than’ and ‘not enough’ as the truth. I often absorb these through my skin and into my heart. I allow these judgments, harshly rendered to send me into myself searching for different truths or forgiveness. I reach outward sometimes-begging forgiveness for harm unintended, other times for harm never done but easily identified as mine.

Hard to believe anything but early judgments even after all this time of fighting for new definitions. Yet still I will live my life with a grateful heart for all the gifts of light, laughter, joy and pathways to victorious survival against great odds. We might not always be warrior queens, perhaps it is enough sometimes we simply find a sunny spot and be thankful for the color yellow and the warmth at noon.

Am I crazy? Maybe just a little. Am I still a romantic, seeing the world through rose colored glasses? Yes, I suppose I am. The truth? I suppose the truth is, still after all this time I simply want to be loved just as I am, flawed, scarred by a life I didn’t ask to live but lived in the best way I could.

That is all, just loved; perhaps after all that was and is too much.