between me and the lamp post.

As happy as I am, I still sometimes feel angry. I don't like it, but at least I'm not bitter. It's a healthy anger, in that there are so many things about which I should be angry. Not personal things, like who cleans more in my house, or why I have to work in an isolated office entirely alone for most of my work week. No, those things don't matter a whole lot. They won't kill me, and more importantly they won't cause harm to anyone else. Right? I mean why not minimize the importance of one person's pain? Why should I feel I deserve any better when people are starving in Africa?

As I wrote this, I began with the thought there are so many people worse off than I. After all, isn't that the sort of person we are supposed to want to be? The kind that doesn't become absorbed in their own life trials. Someone who is unselfish, and considers what other people are going through in spite of and sometimes in lieu of their own needs. That's when I realized I was writing a blog about who I think I would like to be, only it was based on the kind of person whom I've been told is more likeable. The kind of person who thinks Phillip Seymour Hoffman's death deserves less attention simply because he was famous. The kind of person who believes other people's needs are always, without question, more important than mine. All of which is probably the opposite of what I need to be to be a truly decent person. And I wondered, what makes my struggle matter?

There are things with which I struggle every day. And that struggle is largely ignored, if not exacerbated by unnecessary rudeness, criticism, or even unintentional ignorance. Not far into the first paragraph, I thought, "It begins with one." We learn to ignore the problems and plight of one person whose issues make us uncomfortable, under the guise that we care more for the starving people in Africa. I am willing to bet a decent wager that at least 50 percent of people who berate a "friend" for thinking too much about their own struggle, when, after all, they could be worrying about an entire population that can't get the medical treatments to delay the onset of AIDS do little or nothing to try to solve either problem. And by ignoring and berating the problems of one person at a time, we learn also to ignore the problems of the majority of our fellow humans fairly regularly. 

I didn't feel like writing today. I don't even know if any of this makes any sense. I'm so out of practice. Mainly because when I think about writing, I think about sorrow. I think about painful times. I think my voice will not only be heard, but criticized. Not because my voice is incapable of saying anything important or useful, but because it is mine. I am trying to change how I think about this. I am trying to say more. I am celebrating music. I am celebrating my own voice, along with the voices of others. I am enjoying renewed friendships. I am not, however, trying to matter. I just do. 

(So do you).