Easy for You, Hard for Me

How easy it is to place this line in the sand, the air; in our lives. Easy for you, but don’t you know it’s so hard for me. A bit like a child trying to keep up with grown-up stride, but always unable. Unable to walk side by side, unable to keep pace. For a long time I’d felt like this, but unable to tell anyone, just thinking that I somehow felt like a teenager, to everyone else’s grown-up. Stuck, I didn’t want to grow up to be like anyone I’d known, and yet, still looking for someone to look up to. 

This can sometimes be the plight of us who grow up in this culture where intellectual pursuits are rewarded and if you are bright, even the most difficult task, is actually, easy. So, when we as children are told, this is difficult, and we find it’s not, it creates a sense that the person who told us this would be hard, is well, either lying or perhaps, not so bright themselves, and so we are in a way, left to our own devices. 

This also creates the weird paradox that being smart is the be all and end all and that if you just apply yourself, you will be successful. And what we ask, is this success? To be like you? Step one on the quest for self. So now, I know, that much of what was missing for me was not just a role-model, but a sense of being whole, a sense of integrating my emotions into my intellectual self. A sense of having an open heart chakra, a sense of not competing with others, but of just being. I had to deconstruct all the roles that people play to make themselves the adult, understanding now, that I was not the only one feeling like a child inside, but I was one of the few willing to admit, to naming this. 

I had to understand how people hide behind titles like rev, like president, and vp, and professor, and dr and how these labels only represent a passing through of levels of learning or assessment and do not in any way measure a person’s wholeness, a person’s ability to care or to respond appropriately, or even in their own, or others’ best interests. I don’t feel like a teenager anymore, I feel like a person. I have ages within me, but alongside I have compassion and a much bigger scope of understanding how we come to choose how much of ourselves to share and how much to hide. 

Once I so often thought, easy for you, hard for me, now I know, life is hard, life is easy, life is a beautiful mess, in a random ordered world. I don’t have to hold onto being the outsider, I don’t have to be afraid to step into the often stupidness of our systems, of our ineptness, of our humanness, there is no Santa, no one in the sky with a big book, we have each other, we are enough.