This is for you (and you are everyone I know)

Just to avoid any potential confusion, this is not a funny post. This is not a post about bodily excretions coated in glitter or about seemingly sentient rubber duckies whose gaze slices through you like a warm knife through butter. If you want to read something light and fluffy it’s probably best you go and find the handling instructions on the arse tag of a stuffed animal to read for the next few minutes. This won’t be the usual humorous spotlight on the weird perversions that inhabit my mind however it is a spotlight on a greater issue that I’ve seen a lot of people that I love, so intensely, deal with lately and it’s about time that these things are heard…you need to hear them.

You inspire me.

There it is. In essence this is the one statement that remains once I filter through all the other superlatives I would use to describe who you are to me and how I feel for you; this is the phrase from which they’re all built.

I’ve watched you struggle with some of the shittiest hands that could have possibly been dealt, hell, you’ve been given cards that look like they’ve been fashioned from the yellowed corner of an ancient toilet roll and whose marking were hastily smeared in blood. The cards you have held shouldn’t even exist and yet you’ve played them all with grace. No, you may not feel that you’ve been so poised in those initial moments just after the deck is split and your hand revealed to you, sure, but the way in which you played your cards has always been graceful and that, that’s inspiring.

The way you’ve dealt with children who’ve passed, lovers and soul mates lost, the challenging of your preconceived notions of yourself, persistent and crippling illness and surgery, the fracturing of families through infidelity, the breakdown of your psyche, a parent losing that sheen of immortality in your eyes after being touched by a confronting reality, the sheer pain of coming into yourself after years of living in the protective darkness you created within you. Abuse, neglect, dissatisfaction, hurt, loss, grief and betrayal; all either externally inflicted or self-imposed or whatever pain is your pain, and yet regardless of that you’ve come through (or are still coming through) it all with more self-awareness, more integrity and more maturity than you could ever hope to realise and I admire you for it.

So if you’re wondering, yes, this is for you, yes I’m thinking of you – especially if you think I’m not talking about you, I am - so yes, this applies to you. You were in my mind when I wrote this, you’re in my mind now and although you may not feel like you’re doing ok please remember that you sit somewhere inside me and you inspire me. Those things that you think you didn’t or aren’t handling well, you did and do, and the way in which you do so makes me want to be a better person. So while you’re looking at yourself in a less than favourable way remember that I’m looking at you in awe.

This might not mean much and I’m not naïve enough to think it will change anything but I hope that it can stick enough to at least make you hesitate, even if just for a moment, because then there's enough time for you to remember this:

You inspire me, so thank you.