Just one simple thought, and the rest of my life...

Even as I sit here leaning against the purple velvet of my sofa, my laptop propped on my lap, the battery hot against my legs, Florence + The Machine playing a soundtrack over my thoughts...thoughts that just an hour ago I was certain I must share with the world...I feel the pure exhaustion flood over me muddling the once clear vision of tonight's post.  No, I must not give into my circumstances, I am bigger than them, and I will no longer let them win.  I will not hold myself smaller than my surroundings for I am creator of all that shows up in my life.  And with that my thoughts rearrange and I blink back the last three hours of emotional, physical, and spiritual strife which has left me with nothing but tired mussels and surrender.  

Surrender.  What does it mean exactly?  There are so many ways one can "surrender" but tonight, I am finally beginning to grasp what surrender entails.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines surrender as:

sur·ren·der  transitive verb

1

a : to yield to the power, control, or possession of another upon compulsion or demand <surrendered the fort>b : to give up completely or agree to forgo especially in favor of another

2

a : to give (oneself) up into the power of another especially as a prisonerb : to give (oneself) over to something (as an influence)

I can surrender to my circumstances, surrender to my beliefs, surrender to being in my head, to fitting the world in my neat little box, surrender to what I have told myself society dictates as the "correct" way to act, to be...I can go right back to being the person I've been for the last 20 years of my life pretending to be in control of my life or can I surrender to something greater.  Something much bigger.  Something more powerful.  Something with the potential to transform the world.  Surrender to me.

What's the catch? you may be asking.  I mean it seems so black and white doesn't it?  It truly can't be that simple...or can it?  You're a smart one, you've been told all your life that the right thing to do is not always the easiest...but why can't it be?  Where in the universe does it say that everything must be so hard?  Why is choosing to be my true authentic self and really take a stand in creating my vision so difficult?

The simple answer?   Well...there is none.  I have let myself live in fear.  Fear runs my actions, it runs my life.  Why should I let fear win?  What amazing things will I create if I stay in fear?  The concept is so simple, so transparent, yet words come easy.  I can spit big game, I can say I want to change the world, I can claim to be trying.  I am a master of deception, so good that I have even fooled myself.  But deep down, I know it's all a facade.  I know it, even if I don't want to admit it at first...I know I'm a master at manipulating the situation, of playing victim, of convincing myself that i'm doing the best I can...I go through the motions to appear like I'm out there, but the entire time I'm protecting myself.  I am still living out of fear, and it's time to stop.  I have made progress, I am not discrediting my intentions or what I have created up till this point, but I am finally ready to give in.  To stop fighting to keep my fear, to give myself over to something greater, to a greater calling, to surrender to the person I was meant to be regardless of the costs.  The fear.

Surrender is not to give up, but to give in.  To give into why I am where I am...I have created this moment, I have created tonight, I have created everything in my life for this purpose...for this moment.  For in the end that is all we have...there is no past, no future...all we are given is the now.  And now, at long last, I am ready to surrender to the greatness inside of me.  Surrender to being the leader I am, the source of progress, a pillar of strength and light against the overwhelming darkness.  For if it's to be, it's up to me.  I will lead the way, however hard and lonely the path may seem at times, it is the one I choose.  I choose to be great, I choose to be brilliant, I choose to be the only thing I can be...ME.

And now I surrender to the night.  Tomorrow a new day begins.  A new life begins.  I've surrendered to the fear, for there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

A look at the past and the possibility of the future...

Hello again beautiful world!  How has life been treating you? I know I've been away for some time and this time I am not going to apologize for my lack of commitment to keeping up this stream of consciousnesses into the world, instead I am simply going to look ahead and re-commit to truly telling my story and possibly a couple of stories that are not my own...but more about that later.

So today I sat down to write again, after the urging of a friend (and probably one of my only dedicated followers at this time, you know who you are and thank you!) and a recent renewed excitement in my life, my dreams, my goals, and who I am.  I wasn't sure what I wanted to share with the world wide web first...as there have been a number of impactful and really key moments and discoveries I've made since my last post a few months ago.  My first thought was to look at all the posts I've written over time but never finished and have been marooned in my draft box for god knows how long, because in the past I'd get these spurts of inspiration and motivation and begin to write but stop for one reason or another.

I guess here I must go on a slight tangent for anything from this point on to make sense to you.  Simply stated my outlook on life and myself and my dreams and well...everything has undergone a major shift in the past month and half.  This is due to a transformational workshop series that I am part of.  I don't want to go into too much detail at this very moment for that would take far far too much time and I'm on a slight time crunch with class steadily approaching.  I'm sure many of you are confused and have countless questions and crazy thoughts swirling about in your heads when you hear the words "transformational workship" but all will be revealed in time...I promise.  All you need to know now is that the person I am now is the person I was always meant to be, the person I always was, only now I'm discovering what has held me back and allowing myself to truly step into my brilliance.  Sort of like a diamond in the rough analogy (yeay! another analogy from me...you must be thinking, are you suprised? lol)...the workshop was the mechanism; the machine that polished me so to speak and now I get to see how I shine and share that beauty with the world.  Ok, now that you're thinking I just got out of the loony bin and that there must have been some really strong koolade (which if there was it was delicious and I want more) I'll stop and just let you experience my shift as I have.

So back to the unfinished posts.  So I took a look down the list of posts I've published intermixed with the ones with the little red word in italics reading draft beside the titles and realized that I have a lot of unfinished thoughts just waiting to enter the world.  What better place to start then by giving them wings to fly?  Exactly, and how perfect is it that the oldest one dated over a year ago should be what follows...a post I began but could not finish because it was too open, to vulnerable, and at the time too scary to put out into cyberspace because it in very plain words spelled out a pain and what I had long perceived as a weakness I had struggled with and was constantly carrying around in the back of my mind.

When I began this blog over a year ago my first thoughts were to just write fluff pieces about the day to day of living in LA and the simply road and struggles of an actor.  This was during a time when I protected myself and my feelings and was so caged, and closed off that I didn't even always share my true feelings with my closest friends.  I never feel safe telling people what I was feeling, so I'd write.  In private, where no one would ever come across them.  And even at that most my entries about my feelings were so deeply encrypted with metaphor in the off chance someone my someday stumble over them they only painted a portrait of what I may be going through but never black and white came out with it.  Then I began this blog and there was no way in hell that I was going to share my secrets, my feelings where people WOULD be able to see them.  Yet something inside me was dying to, something was screaming out and here I was finally writing it plainly and I couldn't even finish, my fear was too much.  So here you go world, today is a new day and it's a new me...

2/7/11

So much to write, no motivation to put it down

     So it's now the second week of February, and I'm having that uneasy unsettled feeling I get periodically.  It's this horrible nagging anxiety that I wake up with and carry through my day, one that doesn't dissipate when I close my eyes at the end of the night like often my bad days or moods do.  No, this is the sticking type, the "oh shit, here we go again" feeling where i feel like everything is wrong and all I struggle with the internal battle of let's figure it out, let's fix it, let's be productive and make some changes and force this away again and the I just want to sit in my house, be a hermit, watch tv and do nothing, not even eat a full meal feeling which is so counter productive to living or moving forward or anything good.  I don't know how long I've had these bad spells, but I do know the first time one got bad enough for me to react to them the way I do.  I mean everyone has those days, those days when you don't really want to talk to anyone or do much, when you just feel...off but most of the time they go away as easily as they come, right?
     Well not always.  My worst was when I stopped feeling the urgency of living.  Not to say I wanted to stop living, no not at all, but I just stopped seeing the point in waking up, getting out of bed, doing ANYTHING.  I spent four days in my room in college without the will to make myself get up and go to class, wondering how just a few days before it seemed so easy to get up, to go to the gym, to go to campus, to see people, laugh, talk, go to intermural sport games and cheer on my friends.  I had been feeling anxious, apprehensive, unsettled, just off for a while but I never expected it to go that far.  I knew something was wrong, I knew the way I was feeling was not right, was dangerous, and I didn't want to be that person, feel that way, I wanted to live, I wanted to laugh, I wanted to be able to just get up without thinking about it and go about my day like everyone else could, like I had just the week before...but as much as I willed myself to just do it, to just fix myself, I couldn't.  I couldn't figure out the cause of my downward spiral into this horrible depression, I had a good life, I had so much going for me, so much to be thankful for and I knew it.  I wrote lists, I wrote journal entries trying to figure out what it was that caused it or what it was that would stop it, but mainly I just laid there in bed, listening to the world go on outside my windows, feeling the sun streaming in across my body, and wishing I could be normal again.
     I was willing to try anything to cure myself, to get back to the living, to blissfully and ignorantly go on with my life, to care about the unimportant, to just be, and be happy.  When I had the strength to get up and out of my room I went to a therapist,

Do you see where I stop?  It may mean little to you but to me...it's so telling.  All my life I felt I needed to appear strong, to lean on no one, to be able to figure it out myself, on my own, alone...and you know what I found...what that therapist told me?  She told me that I needed to reach out, to open up to people, to choose one or two people in my life and really share myself with them, to create a deeper connection because relationship is what life is about.  So I did.  At first.  And it helped, I gained my best guy friend during that time who to this day is still my best friend and who I turn to in my best and my worst never afraid of judgement and without whom I don't know if I'd have stayed sane through the last 5 years.  But of course as you can tell from that post it wasn't a solve all because I didn't fully grasp the concept.  So I made a couple new close friends but once I felt "cured" and alive again then I went back to my self protective mode with everyone else and you see how well it served me.  Being open and vulnerable is not a bad thing I have discovered, it's not a weakness to ask for support or to show your emotion.  In fact it is quite the opposite.  It creates connection and intimacy and allows others to feel safe opening up to me as well, and that creates love, joy, openness, honesty, courage, passion, and empowerment.  All things beautiful and good in the world.  The funniest thing is, that unfinished post you just read...it really isn't that bad.  So, I battled depression.  Why should I see that as a weakness...so many millions of people go through the same thing each and every year.  No, if anything I should be proud of it, I battled and won.  I am STRONG and my pain and my courage to conquer are not negatives but really positives.  They create who I am, and I get to see that time in my life as a triumph, a win, not a weakness at all.

And I'm not saying it's easy to see it that way, to be open, to be vulnerable.  No, not at all.  And I'm not saying that I'm always that way, I mean come on, I have 28 years of living my life believing that it was scary and bad to be open, that vulnerability creates pain and only a very short time of realizing that those beliefs are incorrect so yes, I still slip back into the fear but as soon as I feel myself shutting down, the very moment I feel my walls start to go up...I stop, and focus out.  Give rather than take, because I am complete and when I believe I can make a difference I do...in my own life and the lives of those around me.  We are all living in fear, so why not be the one to stand in possibility instead?  If I do...will you follow me?