-IVE

Sometimes you just can't face yourself. It's too hard. Coming to terms with who you are without the help of anyone else isn't as easy as people would like to believe it is.

​When you're talking through something with an outside party, you get outside perspectives. The uncomfortable realties come whether or not you're ready for them. When you have to deal with the reality of who you are on your own, you can shove down the parts you don't want to come to terms with pretty easily. It's part of our instinct to survive.

There are plenty of people who say they don't want to just "survive." They want to thrive.

Don't we all.

Thriving has taken the form of a house with a spouse and a couple kids running around. Thriving is fitting into a box that others have decided to brand as success. Anything else is failure or too eccentric to be anything but a strange exception. People have taken thriving and reduced it to surviving.

But what's worse is that we have also convinced ourselves to define other people's survival. If you're not on your way to owning a house after you're done paying off your mortgage in thirty years, you're a loser. A hack. A nobody without a life to put together. You've wasted your time existing if you don't want the romance or the love of children. There's one American Dream, sweetheart, and if you're not living it, you don't deserve to be alive.

Maybe I don't want to be "alive" anymore. Maybe I don't want to "thrive" the way you do. Maybe I want to go back to "survive."

I need beauty to survive. I need it in the form of poetry and literature, music and art, words and people. I need love to survive. Whether it be in the form of my God or of my friends, there's nothing more important or more necessary.

I need to see the world to survive. It's so large and different from everything I know. I can't make it another day if I knew that I wouldn't get to see any of it. As long as I'm in the dark, I can make it through with just the thought of the possibility of making it somewhere.

I need to write to survive. Coming to terms with who I am is impossible without a pen and a page to write on. If I don't force the words out of me, they sit there and rot. They poison me from the inside out because I was too scared to process my reality. That's no way to live.

Forget "thrive" and forget "being alive." It's time to survive.