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@ Anthony DiFiglio
2025-01-25 21:29:02
Periodically, alone, at a less-than-preferred time, you must sit with yourself. Or I suppose you could take a walk, but unless you can guarantee your solidarity, you will likely appear somewhere on the outskirts of normal. While your pride may shine about this little compliment now, it will at times irritate you and ask if you’re sure you want to continue. That’s how everyone gets swallowed. Don’t ask questions. Don’t pick up rugs. Don’t be unruly with yourself or those you love, quietly drift into a more compliant state.
This is why you must go off and write or speak aloud. You ought to answer the question often: would you prefer explore the many routes of numbing medications, or feel your face melting as you take your most prized possessions and hold them to the fire?
There are no lifetime passes on this route. You must renew every day. But you’ve snuck away for months or years this time, and now you have to pay for your absence. You are required to bring your sacrifices to the table in order to continue. Nobody makes it out of here with a neat note, without mistakes or drops of blood on the page. If so, it wasn’t done.
You sacrifice yourself—your rightness, defensiveness, and all forms of denial.
So we sit and write. We pace and speak. We come near pulling our eyes from their sockets. We face ourselves in this heap of trash left to us by our predecessors. It’s not to say they weren’t left it as well—it’s to say it’s yours now.
Whether or not you want to think is your decision alone. Hoping others will take responsibility is an irresponsible management of your own life. As you lift every corner, you’ll find this dirt scattered across your life. You’ll turn your head, cite a guilty party, anything but take ownership.
If you see it, it’s yours. Nothing here belongs to anyone else. That’s the guarantee of mulling around in the mind. You’ll always find this, or you can be sure you’re lying.
It sounds tricky, but it’s only tricky because you are playing the tricks. Let us be clear: any form of matter you see is your responsibility.
Can you breathe now? Not any easier.
If the world around you is so foolish and dumb, why haven’t you adjusted for it sooner? If you did, don’t you think you’d employ a new method of crossing paths with them, beyond disappointment and frustration?
Who is the lagging party?
If you’d notice this quirk—which you cannot stop seeing in the same boring way—you’d realize you see the game very well but haven’t bothered acknowledging the rules. You’ve taken every other route, exactly what someone does when they’re trying not to see what’s in front of them.
You may be aware of this in others, but that’s not sufficient for someone who sits down to attempt to think, for someone who puts himself at the stake. That kind of man is responsible for the game, what he sees, and the rules in which the game is played.
That kind of man abandons the point-keeping devices he’s clung to over the years. He finally realizes he’s been using a unique scoring system to quantify himself, and it’s outdated.
The game goes on. You have a clear score, a clear basis for winners and losers, but you are consistently wrong. Impossible, you say? You’re diligent and precise?
Give it up. Give up your metrics.
If you wish to play the game, know the rules. Sound the buzzer, set all to zero, and dissolve everything you know about keeping track of points. Acknowledge the layers built into the game, the veils you must pierce to be successful within it.
You are susceptible to thinking you’ve thought. You are susceptible to believing it’s all or nothing. You won’t give up a few marbles for a bar of gold.
There’s only one reason. You think very highly of your marbles.
And be it gold or anything else, you are sticking to your marbles for the sake of never changing.
So is it them who can’t change? Is it them who cannot see? Is it they who’ve lost their minds?
Maybe. Maybe.
But it’s also you.
And until you can read the room without defending something, until you learn to play the game as if you knew the rules, your efforts are as good as they’ve always been.