I'm Sorry. I Forgive You 🙏🏾

Everyone has an origin story. To reach the next chapter, you have to revisit it - sometimes. 

It's been a long road with you and I.

A lot of ups and downs. 

A lot of weight carried with few victories. 

Last we saw each other, I talked about Letting Go. Seeing the End as a New Beginning. 

This, for me, will be no different. 

This letting go will not be like the others as there's so much behind the scenes I've come to realize I had to release. A lot that I have to accept about who we are and how we've gotten here. 

But for us, to accept also means owning up to the not so good. The things we've carried that weren't right for us. The things we'd done to people not realizing what we were truly doing in order to gain experiences in life... In order to exist... To survive.

Let me start by saying... I'm sorry. 

I'm sorry for having us apologize for the things we weren't even responsible for. Whether it was other people's emotions or mistakes we did or didn't make. We'd own up for other people's benefit. To keep them happy. To preserve the environment we'd frequent. 

I forgive you for taking on the well-being of the environment. You were just seeking to make everyone better so that you would be safe. So that you would be loved and appreciated for doing the right thing.

I'm sorry for the struggle you faced having to raise me through the struggle and chaos. Dealing with the inner struggle of a husband that never had a chance to heal his own inner child from his scars. 

 

For you going it alone and facing people leaving and betrayal, something would be indoctrinated to internalize through your words and actions... 

 

Locked away in the guided cage of my neurological transmitters. You had to be hard on us to not be like you... 

 

A better way to survival, at the expense of sacrificing mental health for clinging on to the faith like infant fingers to your lord and savior we could only see in the whispers of the wind. The miracles I couldn't understand. 

I forgive you, for trying to convince me to put my desire to write on the back-burner. 

 

For letting me know that it was too fluid of a dream for me. I had to be like you, find a better plan to survive because writers didn't move the needle. 

 

Because writers didn't make enough unless you were lucky or really good. 

 

I could blame you for deterring me, but that was ultimately on me. 

 

I took the advice of loved ones as gospel, as though you were looking out for me...and yet I despised it. It made me question my own worth. My own capabilities as someone who's purpose from the 3rd grade forward was to communicate his thoughts, feelings, and innermost complexities out to the rest of the world. 

 

I started to doubt that even what I had would be good enough and so my writing ceased to exist for a time. I took what you said to remind me that I would need to get approval from others out here in the field to do what I do, and it would force me to stop mid project and wonder if it was good enough? Realistic enough? Able to catch the eyes of others to "buy in"? 

 

So many questions and yet, so many projects differed...until now. 

I'm sorry for disappointing you, hurting you with promises of love, attention, and being present always and forever, and yet all the times I'd done the opposite. 

 

I wanted to be a good man, and yet there was something inside that was flawed all along.  

 

The understanding that to love required service. I had to do something to be loved. To keep who I wanted to be with. 

 

The understanding that love would forever be fleeting as soon as what I did wasn't enough...the disappointment would come in the form of no intimacy, the arguments, the distance, the abandonment. 

 

I'd been so accustomed to things going wrong in my relationships that I braced myself with self-sabotage...always finding a way to break away. To find fault, to find something that scared me and bring it more into existence. Hyper-vigilance in the worst kind of form. 

 

I learned this from childhood, where I would strive to curate a careful environment in the midst of the chaos. I had to be good for mom, to aide her. To save her. That was love right? Dad was gone...he left her...I couldn't leave her. I had to be good because being good was a service and that would earn love and peace.That would make the chaos go away. If I were this, I would get and keep that. 

 

But life would show me otherwise, and so I braced by messing things up, bringing the worst out of any relationship I was in...making it something that it wasn't until it was. 

 

I made you shed tears over my inability to stay loyal to you, through thick and thin, a reflection of me avoiding the intimacy with myself. Chasing the next green thing over the dried up terrain,only to realize that my own mental was decaying the ground we stood on. 

I forgive you, for stepping away from me.  

 

For doing onto me, what I did to those I said and felt that I loved for a time. 

 

You taught me a painful, yet valuable lesson, that all things come to an end..and our bond was no different. 

 

I was hurt, angry, bitter because you were showing me what nature has always done. That everything serves a purpose and moves on.   

 

That nothing lasts forever. 

 

That everything evolves including me. 

 

I failed to realize this because I was always afraid of losing people close to me, because I felt like I couldn't survive without them. It all stemmed from my father leaving. 

 

His leaving made me afraid that if I didn't do something to keep people close to me, I would end up alone...a fear worse than death itself. So when you all stopped talking to me, it broke me...or so I thought.  

I started to realize that it was all about mutually aligned intent....and if it did not match, one or the both of us would fall out of it. 

 

It was inevitable, and unfortunately it took forever to learn because I was trapped at four years old, knowing that Dad was gone living a fractured life to numb the pain of his own childhood...the ghosts in his closet slowly killing him with every drug he could possibly take. 

I'm sorry for so many years of abandoning you while I marched on meandering roads to survive. 

 

That is all my family had ever known aside from following God, or so we thought. 

 

Generations of suffering led to our influence to strive and struggle. For me, it was so much that I ignored you crying out saying: 

 

'Hey, take a moment. Talk to me. Let's write something. Lets reflect.'

 

I ignored you. 

 

I locked you up in a cage never to return, because I had a family to take care of. 

 

I had bills to pay. 

 

I had to man - up and undo the damages done generations before I came into existence. 

 

I had to stop being so pitiful, kind,and caring - but I couldn't be a heartless bastard. 

 

It was never in me because even though I wouldn't listen to you, you were there living through me in subtle ways. Ways I wouldn't understand until I got to this point in my life - our life. 

 

Our midlife crisis. 

 

When we start, or are forced to sit down and really inventory our lives. When we ask the hard questions of: 

 

"What the fuck was I thinking?"

 

 "Where do I need to go now in life?"

 

 "Is this the right call?"

I forgive you for being terrified and scared of a life full of unknowns. 

 

A life full of perceived threats because you were exposed so young to the twisted reality of life for people like me. For a family like mine. 

 

I know that life made you nervous through electric shocks through your nervous system. I felt your emotions so many times through heightened breaths at the highest altitude, and thunderous drum-rolls in my chest that I could never undo. 

 

That's the life we knew...that you came to know, because there was never any certainty other than what you had you were subject to lose at a moments notice. We learned to see life that way rather than an adventure or an opportunity to play adjust and play again. 

 

I lacked confidence for a long time. Mom thought the military would straighten that out. It did but it didn't. 

 

I was still influenced by you, scared in the corner watching the world crumble through what was your reality, moving place to place while you watched mom cry and get angry while holding in her emotions to feel strong...because people would take advantage of her emotions, or so she led herself to believe from her experiences....the same way you threw your heart out to connect to others so they could see you and save you from the big bad monster of loneliness.

I'm sorry for being so hard on you. 

 

I'd forgotten what it meant to live free because I got accustomed to control to ensure stability that would escape me like sand. 

 

I'd forgotten what it's like to live free, without worry. Dare I say I never really had that. 

 

But I felt that if I was perfect enough, if I was confident enough, if I were in control enough, that things would be easier in the long run.  

 

But what I'd come to realize and despise about myself is - control is an illusion. 

 

No matter how much you try to ACT like you have everything under control, you'll end up taking a loss.  

No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy, or rather, with our own thoughts or actions. 

 

I've been rigid with the little things because in a way, no one was really there to guide me except Mom...and even she would instill in me the time-tested advice to work hard and be a man. 

 

To fight for what I wanted. 

 

Somehow, I took being an adult and a parent as being flawless or showing no signs of fragility..a lofty goal in itself. I saw it as if I made mistakes, I would be less of a man, which meant that people wouldn't see the value in me and would leave. 

 

Even worse is having that mentality and putting that on my own children. Giving the impression that love was conditional vs unconditional whether they had quirks or didn't...something that I know I need to improve. 

 

Survival instinct blinded the way I thought and saw the world and I want to change that. I want to be lighter on us. 

For a long time I had been lost, but it recently took a falling out with someone that wanted the best for me, for me to take the time to look within and take my time to get back in touch with you...the true form of me. 

 

The me with fresh wounds. 

 

The past few days have been a lot of searching for answers as to why I lived this way...and I realized the beginning was when Dad left...when we ended up homeless as a child, then again as an adult...loosing everything in the process we tried to have a grasp on. 

 

I'd grasp to the losses, but not to you. 

 

I'd toss you aside focused on fixing and preventing...believing that it would justify my worth. But my worth isn't based on what I do...my worth is based on who I am, and what inside - the real version of me. 

And so, I am letting go. I have to. I have to reconnect with you - the real version of me. I have to understand and accept that I no longer need to live in the past afraid of the future because of what happened. 

 

I can now live on beyond my past. I can be ME. I can forgive what happened,and release the energy of apologies, of guilt, of fear, struggle and survival.

I need and want to just...BE.

#IAmRonin #OpenLoops #StillHere #Forgiveness #SelfLove #Outcasts #LettingGo #ImSorry