A redditor reached out to me today. They took the time to explain how they have been following the progress I have made since my first posts. That in itself meant the world to me so I had to respond.
Conversation is the greatest form of art. by listening to another and comparing your own experiences with theirs melts together a connection that is the purest form of individuality. That connection can never be recreated by you or the other person with someone else.
To get to my point, our conversations led me to express that I wanted a place for people to feel safe, where the focus of conversation is not just self help or religion or drugs or even life and death.
It’s bigger than that. We have to think about all the things that connect us, the bigger picture.
People might say “don’t make connections that aren’t there”, but in fact they are just avoiding the conversations that scare them.
Let’s overly generalize some stuff so I can blur some lines for you.
Religion typically says that drugs are bad. A god fearing Christian should not be actively shooting up heroin. this does not mean that the entity with the heroin doesn’t believe in religion. The heroin addict is just seeing religion from a different perspective, regardless if they had heroin or not.
They say you should try to put yourself in other people’s shoes, but not everyone has shoes. a person in a comfortable home may donate money to help the ones starving in the streets, but until they have starved on the streets themselves they can only be sympathetic, not empathetic (I think I got that right?). Some people drop everything and dive in through organized programs to solve this problem.
But before you put a political label on me, I’m going to tell you that this goes both ways. A person who finds themselves at a lower rung than another, whether it’s money, life experience, happiness levels, relationship statuses… it can incite feelings to see another person at a different level than ourselves, both positive and negative.
A close friend once really drilled the idea in my head that we are at different statuses for everything. I may make more money than the friend next to me, but they don’t have childhood abuse bothering them each day in the back of their memory banks. They have other problems to work on.
We’re all working on different shit. With a chaotic nature a person can identify these things by immersing themselves in the communities. BUT it is important to not dig too deep into one idea, but rather become a jack of all trades so your logic is not overwritten by indulging too much.
I don’t like to talk about myself much but I’ve experienced many extremes in my life. I’ve worked in neighborhoods where I don’t speak their language and hide behind bulletproof glass while trying to stop people from smoking crack in the bathrooms. A job where I sit with executives and upper management in meetings about my contributions to the company. A job trying to sell as much liquor as possible to broke college students so I can hopefully afford to get drunk myself.
When you dip your toes into a new world it opens up wild doors you never knew existed. that’s what keeps me going each day, is knowing that no matter how great things can get, it can always get greatered like cheese.