Bravery, truth and hugging

Lots of times, people say I'm brave when I write something like THIS that reveals some of the less flattering parts of me and my experience. While I appreciate this compliment, I also find it kind of sad that we have to be brave in order to tell the truth about who we are.

I wish it wasn't brave to say, "I've done this and it wasn't very smart." I wish it was just part of how life worked. I wish we all went around offering the truth all the time. I wish we didn't feel like living meant that we just had to accept that we are going to be strangled by secrets. I wish that everybody understood that there isn't anything they've done that is worth hiding.

Well, unless you're a pile of shit. If you're a fucking douche bag who hurts people and robs people and makes the world a terrible place for people... well, go ahead and pretend you're not you. Nobody cares, anyway.

But, you.

Little, beautiful person who is full to the brim of experiences and love and fear and pain. You, who are nervous stepping out of your door in the morning. You, who is telling yourself that you're not good enough, you're not worthwhile, you're not amazing.

You are amazing. Even the not-so-flattering parts of you. Even the parts that make you cry in dressing room mirrors. Even the parts that keep you up at night. The parts that make you scared to check your voice mail. The parts that you want to deny.

There isn't anything to gain from hiding. There is so much connection and beauty to gain by standing up and saying, "I am here. This is what I am, as best as I know. This is what I think and this is how I feel. This is what I've done. I am lonely not because I deserve it, but because we're all lonely."

Maybe if we all offered one another the truth instead of a white-washed, watered down, spruced up version of what it means to be us, we wouldn't feel so lonely all the time.

I know you're lonely. I know this because people are sad. We shoot off in all different directions, chasing different things in different bodies, but all we really want is another human being to press up against in the night. The only time we ever feel really good is when we're wrapping our arms around somebody. When we're opening our lips for somebody else's lips. The time we're the most happy is when we find somebody to get inside of, or to invite inside of us. We claw at one another, trying to bury ourselves in the cavity of our togetherness. We call it love. We want to be so close and so happy that we create new people out of that love. We want to create new life when we're happy.

All we want is to be inside of one another.

This is why I think that the concept of hugging is tremendously sad. We're just little animals who want to be together. It is sad that we create so much illusion and we tell so many half-truths about who we are, that we're willing to torture ourselves for our partners, for somebody to keep us warm. People die all the time because the right person doesn't love them. People die all the time because they're lonely.

That's why you need to tell the truth. That's how I know who you are. That's how I know that you see me and I see you. Because we all feel the same things about the hard stuff. We all want to collapse sometimes. We all feel unsafe and afraid of being exposed. We all get mad, we all get afraid, we all have crushes on inappropriate people and cry because of songs about beauty. We all get overwhelmed. We all hate ourselves. We all make mistakes. We all do bad things on purpose. We're all selfish. We're all mutable. We're all for real and we all need to see the light of day.

We're little tornadoes in the same storm. We have to tell the truth because then we might not be by ourselves. We might not be alone. I'm not brave, I just want you beside me. I just want to be you. I just want you inside me.



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