Reparations

"It is a messed up thing to be unkind to yourself but it’s progress when you start realizing it."

- a very dear friend.

Last year invoked and forced a lot of change for me. I found myself up at odd times at night dissecting the things I believe in and really diving into the what’s, why’s, and how’s. Under different circumstances, I would never have had the time to think and reconsider the essence of the most personal things. Where I’m going with this strain of thought, is that we often undermine the value of very simple things in our life. We don't all live the same frequency of the enormous undertaking that is life and so we don’t quite value the same things similarly. So you spend a lot of time being unkind to yourself basing your life on someone else’s. And it isn’t the same. It will never be the same. So why do it? On the one hand, we can put all of the blame on society and it’s inhuman expectations on its very diverse human individuals. But way out, on the other hand, we have to, I suppose blame ourselves. In many situations that I have thought over, the recurring statement that jumped out at me was, you knew that something was amiss, why didn’t you catch yourself or hold yourself accountable for putting yourself in a narrative that you didn’t really have to be in? 

So that’s how the concept of reparations stood out to me. Along with millions of others, I have been heavily invested in the political sphere this year. And reparations is something that I read up on a lot thanks to an invigorating history class I took. Reparations are the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. By no means related to that in the literal political sense, I began processing the concept and what it could do for me and my life. Speaking from an individual microscopic standpoint, how does one quantify the wrongs that they commit against themselves? And then further along in that thought, how does one repay themselves off the debt that they owe? Bear with me while I string along with endless thoughts and try to come to some kind of conclusion or resolution along the way.

We constantly live in a lull of universally applicable false pretenses that dictate the way we treat ourselves. I will not factor society into this although it seems like I should because they do give us a template of values at birth that seem to go on and dictate everything in our lives and takes over a chunk if not for all of our belief system. What these false pretenses and value templates then go on to do is have us put enormous amounts of work, not into educating ourselves or learning how we can do and be better, but to ensure we end up in some way the antagonists of our own lives when surely that is not how it is supposed to be. It starts off with quite minute things such as denying ourselves of something we want because we begin to rationalize at that point that our happiness and our wants are outweighed by that which we were told we need. As this becomes a habit, we start denying ourselves simple kindness and happiness in lieu of our environment and it’s preset. We start giving in to our mundane lifestyle and begin to put ourselves on the back burner. On an individual level, up until last year, I don’t believe that I ever let myself feel or experience anything. I existed on a superficial 9 to 5 plane and shoved myself into the tiniest box I could find. I denied myself free time, things that I loved doing, people that I thoroughly enjoyed, just to in my head at least, survive. Survival, as I have begun to realize, is a concept that we approach quite drastically and I don’t know why. Survival in its most literal sense is a state or fact of continuing to live or exist. So why have we been made to feel as if simply living or existing is somehow not enough? Why does our life have to be so drastically this or that? How much do we owe ourselves? A lifetime’s worth is reasonable I think. 

As a resolution to that entire field of thought, I came to this solely selfish and individual concept of the reparations I owe myself. When all is said and done, you simply realize you are of the utmost importance and that you cannot in good conscience carry on being unkind to yourself and making yourself miserable and somehow expect the light at the end of the tunnel to be a bucket of happiness and joy given to you that you can then enjoy your life with. The tunnel is your lifetime and if you have already made it up to be dark, lonely, and empty of joy, you will be left at the end of it with just that, a life’s worth of resentment, unkindness, and wrongdoings against yourself racked up. I hope this isn’t an individual feeling I’m feeling and that the last year somehow solidified this for a lot of people to: go all the way ahead and be selfish. Be that and spend your time paying yourself back for all of the times you weren’t. Nothing has made me happier than giving myself what I want and letting myself experience everything I have wanted to. I don’t know if I’ll ever be all the way paid up for the lifetime that I have spent letting things, situations and people drown me out but I sure as hell am going to consciously endeavor to try. Try to be the protagonist of my own life. Because you are just that.