“The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”Virginia Woolf

I’ve only ever been one person, and that is me.

It’s hard to decide what to do with nervous energy, so I’m typing. Fast, like a whirlwind, a flurry of taps. The noise is somewhat irritating. Much like waiting and worrying. I rode the train with my heart in my mouth, on my sleeve, beating haphazardly everywhere but where it was supposed to. It is a bad decision to drink coke when you are already nervous. But for want of something constructive to do, I cracked open a can and skulled 1/3 before I was really aware of what I was doing. I do not like this feeling, not that I suppose anyone really does. In fact I flat out hate feeling my guts spin like a washing machine while my heart pumps blood that burns like acid through every capillary. And there is nothing I can do. I’m fretting for someone else, for situations outside of my control.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote a blog, seems my time has been taken prisoner by deadlines and due dates that forbid even the most trivial procrastination. Or perhaps it is just that I’ve found a better way to procrastinate, namely by napping on riverbanks and falling away from negativity and into someone-in-particular. Someone-in-particular that has my guts twisted tight in little knots.

It’s amazing how much you can absorb someone else’s tension, be scared for them. It’s amazing to me anyway. It scares me in fact. What is that fear of? Fear of feeling I suppose. Of surrendering rationality to emotion. The fear is pointless of course, like most fear, but feeling is involuntary. It springs from some unconscious well deep within. Which is why it’s madness to chastise, persecute, mock or dare I say, hate, someone for something that they feel, or who they feel for. And yet we do, people do, and so people have to fear what people will think of them if and when they are honest about who they are.

Perhaps I’m talking in circles again, perhaps you know in essence the fear of which I speak. The fear that you will not be accepted for being yourself. For believing there is a god, or that you should be able to wear purple socks with green shorts or that Frank can love Scott without the whole-flippin-world disintegrating into a thousand sinful pieces. People just want to tell you how to live your life, at each and every turn. Them, they, the unspecified bulk of people I’m rampantly generalising about, don’t accept others for who they are because they have some conception of who they should be instead. Fuck knows how they could think that would be better. The only person they have ever been is themself, so why should they expect differently of others?

Perhaps, I’m sorry, I’m just thinking out loud again, speaking in type-fulls. The world, I think, is only ever terrible and wonderful at the same time. Two hands linked by the finest thread of heartstrings should be rejoiced in, but in some eyes there is only a checklist of what is right and wrong, what is accepted and normal, and what is therefore abnormal, unaccepted. Tolerance, acceptance – what are they, curse words? I know people, good people, people who live their lives with open hearts, and whose friendship and acceptance I cherish. If only, if only, the rest of the world had eyes like them.

People change, the world changes, and yet it all stays the same. In the History of the World according to Lea, the last 100 years have been a progression towards an ever more inclusive world.

Maybe in another 100 years the word ‘normal’ will be irrelevant and only ‘human’ will be heard.