The reason why I have the drive to get up every morning is because I keep hoping that today—today—I will make something beautiful.

There is no other reason. Love? Past that. Yesteryears’s news. Coffee? Take it or leave it. Oddly, over the years, I’ve found there’s less time to tell the truth to the truly deserving.

I tell them the plain truth. I don’t want to miss a day to make something beautiful.

I thought it was just me. I thought I was petty, flowery, and alone. And suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. Although, the last one has people suffering from loneliness by definition.

Now I’ve overheard a good male friend with whom I share just about every single trait saying that too. And on one podcast, an amazingly honest and great human of a writer and music producer said the same too. Along with many others saying if they could just touch one person, it was worth doing it despite the pain. Oh right, mansy-pansy Romantic. That’s the term I was getting at.

As a writer, honesty is the only persona I want to default to. Don’t get me wrong; of course I’ve lied. I know of only two individuals who have the integrity to lie as least as possible, if at all. They hold my utter respect. Especially since both are wonderful parents and gainfully employed. I’ve never had a job where I didn’t lie on the application or in the interview unless I was delusional enough to think honesty as a policy trumps sales tactics. Impossible.

I’ve had victim mentality for quite a long time. Part of that is that that’s all they teach you I rehab for mental illness. Over succeeding years, the experience of stigma only reinforced the filter of victim mentality. I could have turned it on its head. In fact I’ve tried. I still get rejected/fired/gaslit etc. that comes with the stigma. Once people hear your story or even the sz word, they reject you. Pretty soon, you learn to go it alone.

Well not entirely. I do have a great family and friends and professionals who have my back. I should take that more seriously. All the more to believe that I had succumbed to victim mentality. It occurred to me today that ok, this and that happened, but it is now my problem. What am going to do about it?

The first thing is to not make my disability my excuse. That’s a Jordan Peterson quote. I have to change incrementally. Secondly, once there, I have to learn to serve those who fell into that same place and want or could get out too. That’s a while yet ahead of me, perhaps.

That’s not to say my sz is going to go away. It never will. Since meds and being a slower problem solver become the bitter pill, why fight them? Why not swallow both and then ask what else can I do with my life?

It’s never over until the end of life. Meanwhile, since we’ll never be normal, we can still make a difference. It may be a niche market; it may be a simple job where the responsibilities are not too many but pays the rent, food, bills, plus some left over for savings and doing your real mission: to create, to make beauty in your art.

But that’s no longer today’s reality. Beauty or the sense and ability to envision or grasp beauty is far more impeded by low morale really. It doesn’t take much; we humans are hyper-sensitive to innuendo and verbal violence these days of no real fault of our own. Social norms and trends have successfully reeducated us. The question remains: Do we have the guts to say what we really think? Or rather more poignantly, do we have the courage to be faithful to our true self?

That’s where beauty sprouts. At the likelihood I’ll be accused of lifting this sentence from ChatGPT, but I haven’t: raw honesty beats gilded palaces any day. “Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting , with strife.” That last sentence I did lift from the Book of Proverbs from the Holy Bible (Proverbs 17:1 NIV). Probably the Bible that contains uniquely beautiful writings for which there is no parallel.

I am sad tonight though. No matter how high my levels of serotonin may be, rendering my brain unable to be that depressed, happy chemicals do not heal the emotional heart. Yes, it’s 1:09AM. Take your meds and go to sleep, stupid girl. I feel though I haven’t lived yet though it’s been a long day and I’ve got bedtime tasks to do. But I still search and wait for beauty. That answers the question why I’ve fought sleep since childhood. I’m not necessarily an endogenous insomniac. I am necessarily an emotional insomniac.

The bright silver lining is that the storm clouds are promising. I feel I still haven’t begun to contribute. A once good friend said that making art is like putting something new back into the basket whereas before I had taken something away. Or perhaps someone else might just have always taken without thought of giving back. Frankly, I’m not that cynical. Though it remains a statistical possibility, I think humans are basically good despite whatever my blah bah southern Baptist experience might have inculcated in me.

Hang on. Hang onto Beauty and light. The child that found that dream long ago might still be protesting against the night shroud as she refuses to fall asleep.

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