We all have our one story. Mine has been complicated. Much of my life, I have see it through a negative lens, my glasses were dirt-stained and not rose-colored. I have spent much of my adolescence and 20s brooding. I was am "woe-is-me", anything bad that happened was expected but still bemoaned, anything good was random and undeserved. I can't tell where or how this line of thinking became the norm, but it did. It wore deep into my psyche, like the well worn path of a river through a canyon. Not loving myself became comfortable. Constantly comparing myself to the stereotypes of what I should be toward the black community and the gay community. I wasn't tall enough, I wasn't light enough, I wasn't man enough. My own personal shortcomings translated into my professional life. I became burnt out, opportunities may have been available, but I wasn't open to them. I was no longer progressing into something or someone better. I became static.

I can read through my past blog entries and all I can think is how much I really beat myself down. Years, I wasted so much energy wallowing in negativity, expecting the worse, not loving or accepting who I was and not attempting to put in the work to change. That has to end. I know that I'm ready to start doing more things. Despite my current terrible job and low pay, I got a decent education and something inside me tells me I can do more, be better. I don't know if its my ego, or something destructive, but I have always felt that I was meant to do something big with my life. Like, everything that I had experiences would lead to something. Nothing about who I see myself as should be mediocre.

I can't rewrite the story. Shit happened in the past. I missed out on things and people. I was lonely. I was sad. But I also made good friends. I had some brief, but nice romantic entanglements (tried to phrase this as well as possible lol) I can revise how I looked at the past. I can stop remembering only the bad parts, but the good parts as well. I can look and examine the sources of my anguish, much of which is self-inflicting, and I can work to let it go. I can put more faith in myself, believe that things will work out the way that they should. I won't operate on the assumption that they will not. I can accept who I am, but also work to build up the parts of myself that could stand to be better.