Failing Uphill

The elephant in the room is squatting in the house.

It’s something most people don’t like to talk about.

And rightfully so. Who wants to accept that the deck is stacked against them, or that their success is purely based on the fact that they were eased in -

Financially, socially, culturally.

The elephant is named nepotism, and it’s shitting over all of us.

Even those it benefits.

It is what it is. This ain’t a rant against anyone whose career was launched on the wings of some golden mound of poop. We all need to make our way in anyway we can.

This is a reminder to all of us climbing through the mudslide of disadvantage that there’s no other way to do it other than to keep climbing.

I know it’s hard. There are so many days when everything feels heavy. When every stroke on the keyboard is a Herculean task, each finger weighed down by thousand pound finger-traps that are biting you with the force of a rabid crocodiles.

But when that’s going down, you have two options: let them eat you, or make friends with them and ask them how you taste.

The former may be a release, but it also means all your dreams will never come true.

The latter is gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt like the furnaces of hell. But if you can endure, you’ll come out stronger, better, and more beautiful than you can possibly imagine.

The worst part about all of this is you’re going to fail repeatedly on this climb. You’re going to slip and fall and tumble ass-backwards, sometimes even further down from the place where you started.

It sucks.

No other way around it.

But one day something is gonna hit.

And when that thing does, people are going to see the trail you cut through the avalanche of despair and follow you up it. And then they’ll look through your failed trails and follow those, too, because there’s wisdom is failure. There’s beauty. There’s will and wonder and all that lame shit.

You’ll reach the top and find that amazing view is actually something you created.

I know - some people really don’t deserve what they got. But you can’t change that. All you can change is your fortitude. And you can do it. See that mountain? It’s there for you to climb.

A Cage Made of Shadows

It’s a monster you cannot see.

Seeping through the crevices of your life to invade your senses and corrupt your sensibilities. It molds its corrupted form over your thoughts, feelings, and emotions and contorts them into lies you cannot help but believe.

That’s how depression works. That’s what’s so insidious about it. It comes as poison cloaked as truth. It likens itself to wisdom, when in reality it’s a blanket made from knives. There’s no truth or comfort in its machinations. Only a prison of pain.

Of course try recognizing this when you’re tangled in depression’s thorns.

But that’s exactly what you need to do.

When you’re caught up in the big lie, the first and most important step is calling it out. Staring it straight in the face and letting it know that you know exactly what it is. This ain’t a cure-all. You won’t magically feel better. But it’s the first step in releasing yourself from depression’s grip. Staring it in the eye helps you to recognize that, for all its dreadful power, depression is in truth a mirage. An illusion with teeth. A darkness lying to itself so to make you believe its lie.

This ain’t easy. Nothing about it is easy. It takes everything to combat this false dragon. But combat it you must. And in order to do that, you must - you must - face it head on and know it for the liar that it is.