Excuses

I really just wanted to connect with somebody. 

To feel the same things with somebody. 

I wanted to understand someone and feel understood. 

When I was younger I had no idea what these things meant or how important it was to have a good connection and not a bad one. 

When I was younger I thought hurtful words were just as good as kind ones when someone's paying attention to you.

More often than I'd like to admit I’m a spiteful person. You hurt me and I hurt you even worse. I fight fire with fire and I can always be meaner. 

You think that was bad? Well watch this. 

I wish I wasn't this way but if I'm being honest some days I am.

I wonder what I had to prove.

I used to connect to people through pain. I got good at lashing out and taking it right back. You hurt me and I hurt you and then we’d help pick each other up, clean up the wounds and say our apologies. 

We thought this was love 

 We thought we were being selfless by loving the other one after all the hurtful words they’d said. 

We thought that's what love was. We thought that love meant pain and hurt and heartbreak. 

We thought it was selfless to say we loved someone else more than we loved ourselves.

But it was only us being selfish.

We forgave one another, over and over because the words that kept falling from our lips sounded so sincere. 

"I'm sorry I can't help it, I don't know why I do it, It's just the way I am."

They were the perfect vulnerable promises we could make. 

But what we didn’t know then was that we weren't making promises we were making excuses.

We had no idea what it meant to change. We didn't want to know either. We thought we were doing so good. We thought we could love each other until the other's pain was gone. We thought that would fill us up, make us whole again, make us free of our own pains and hurts. 

How foolish we were and yet we were happy to keep making those same old mistakes. 

I wanted to connect with somebody and harsh words of connection are better than no words at all because we didn't care what we felt as long as it was something more than this nothing.

Misery loves company and a pain that's familiar is better than pain unknown because we know how to handle it, we know what to do with it, we know where it hurts and how to get rid of it, or how to keep it for nights when we're alone. When we need something to validate us, make it seem okay that we are the way we are.

We can't help it, we were born this way, but we'll try to change… 

Excuses. 

False promises that said we were trying to change. 

And maybe some days we were trying to change, to be better.

Maybe we were better today than we were yesterday or maybe...Maybe what? 

Who are we really? 

Who are we actually trying to be?

Why do we keep making the same mistakes? Isn't a mistake repeated more than once a choice? 

If so, then why don't we want to change?

Do the harsh words still taste good? Are our actions still justified by what others did to us first?

These days harsh words only for the sake of being harsh fill my mouth with a bitterness I’m tired of tasting on my tongue. 

I'm still learning to turn the other cheek. 

Still learning to mean it when I say I want to change. 

To mean it when I say I want better and taking better when I see it and not being afraid to face it.  

Something better is something different, an opening to a different kind of pain I don't know how to deal with. But if you ask for better sooner or later it'll turn up because you can't talk of things you don't mean when the universe is always listening. There's a reason why they tell you to be careful what you wish for.

What I wish for now is to understand myself better. It took awhile for me to realize it was selfish to want someone to understand me when I didn’t even want to understand me.  

When I was younger I chased after all the wrong things.

Attention was attention, even if they were being mean at least they were looking at me. 

How foolish I was. I followed after all the wrong things. I knew nothing of love and pain was my best friend. 

At a point I wasn't even trying to feel love anymore I was just scrambling to not be alone in anything. I wanted to feel the same as others no matter what it was. Pain, love, anger, regret. I clung to everything that didn’t involve me being alone and having to face why I was so convinced that I had to live a life of misery. I might as well have said those hurtful words to the mirror and saved the middle man. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone else, I just needed to justify in myself why I deserved to feel what I did.

Thankfully I don’t put myself through that anymore. I don’t think I deserve pain or that I don’t deserve  to be happy.

I really wish I knew what I was thinking and when I look back I think things could have been so different.

But things happen how they’re supposed to... 

I just wish I hadn’t created so much destruction in my path or hurt the people I did along the way.