These past weeks and days have been a constant battle between my want of diligent structure in a lifestyle that makes sense and my habit of indulgent withdrawals from the current lifestyle that overwhelms and irritates me. 

More and more people I take notice of who operate with no regard to anyone or anything else, regardless of the impacts or risks. No base accord, from start to finish, is ever established when interacting with minds soiled with habits and thoughts, steeped and stained in incoherence. Their responses and actions, vulgar and crude, are directly proportional to ill-ulterior motives; un-knowing victims of the consequences of premature mental stagnation and emotional un-regulation. A growing population of the operationally and manneristically tactless. 

I could go on, feeding my frustrations, about what I feel the problems of day-to-day life to be and the many grievances I feel as someone who still believes in the importance and power of patience, attentiveness, and deliberate intention when witnessing how people conduct themselves, OR I could shift my care and attention back towards my own personal pursuits.

Kept and calm within my own sphere, I determine the power my stressors have over me. It is not my responsibility to clock and check each and every interaction for signs of offense and intrusion, nor do I have the right to insist someone change or alter their actions to what I feel is morally and socially appropriate. I refuse to care more about a person’s thoughts and actions than they do themselves, so I choose to live in such a way where my thoughts and actions direct me towards a future rich in depth and meaning from intentional foresight.

“Happenstance favors the open, not the rigid.”

I lost my mind to the dialogue of the world, pleading to be seen, noticed, and appreciated, yet always finding myself suppressed and silenced under its noise and chatter, begging for a space to open up to breathe. But muddled there, somewhere in the midst of the fight for flight of this lifestyle lay the seedling of the woman I’ve been desiring to grow into. For when the battle ends, it’s the environment of the victor’s values that determines how that seedling grows. 

A passion for ambition burning back into itself is the fusion at the core of a life beyond a romantic’s horizon. Change is the only constant in all living things. Fluidity, stoic as the sea and free as the sky, knows no true division. 

Both ambition and passion live within me, but in contrary ways and contradicting directions. I’ve been shown and told way too much to pretend I don’t know it’s the coupled relation of the two that begets power and influence, and I have prayed and learned too much to keep choosing a life of stagnation over progression. I was always afraid of the demands that distance required, but now I know that managing the mind is what matters most. The choice is mine; the arms of another distracting spell or to bite the bullet in amputation of old bad habits. 

There are parts of me that cannot come any further; habits I once excused, impulses I once entertained, and patterns that played on from my hesitations have reached their end. Not everything deserves to be refined; some things must be removed entirely. I will not negotiate with what negatively impacts me, nor will I preserve what has already proven its cost. There is no grief worth indulging in, only the clarity of knowing that growth demands loss. What remains is not emptiness, but space for discipline and intention to define and structure a life no longer diluted by what I refused to let go of.

“I was so naive to think [they] could be stronger than me” – Raveena.