I’ve probably written, oh, about 20 posts over the last 6 weeks… I’m still not sure which will ever see the light of day… Some are controversial and some would just be hard to read for people in my life… well, the ones that want you to be fine regardless of how you really feel.  Turns out that’s quite a lot… including my own family.

There is a lot of stuff going on in my life, none of it particularly bad I suppose…. but it has made me question myself… and the people around me.  I’ve had a very hard time rejoining the world – in fact I’m still not quite there, baby steps.  It’s like, every little step I make I’m poisoned by something or someone.

I suppose everyone who is chronically or critically ill goes through his phase where they think this is happening to them because they are bad people…. I went through that particularly badly at the start of my course of Prednisone.  I talked to a lot of both chronically and critically ill people since then… and I know that’s not it at all.  There are lots of theories on why it happens to a particular person, I happen to like the one that goes something like “only the people who can bare the burden and burdened with it”.

The fact is, I wake up every day and I try to be the best person I can be on that given day.  That doesn’t mean I’m perfect – a lot of situations I’m put in make me anything but… it does mean I try not to hurt people deliberately and I try and live in the best way I know how.

One thing I know for sure is we all have good and bad in us – every single person.. whether they be white, black, Asian, Christian, Buddhist… every single person… has to wake up in the morning and make that decision for themselves.  It doesn’t matter who they are.  People bought up in first world countries with good parents and a great childhood do bad things, same as someone who’s come from the Congo where they were raped repeatedly and terrorized.  A person or a religion or a race of people isn’t inherently good or bad… they are both… its which part they act on that makes them either good… or bad.  So saying all that – yes, I also believe people can change… and if someone in my life did, I would try my hardest to forgive and see that good part.  No matter the damage…

I’ve seen so many people turn that good side off lately… at home, on the news and especially at work…. I sit and I listen to people saying such hateful things about people they know nothing about?  Don’t you think you should get to know someone before you launch an all out attack on them – or what really are you attacking?  Something that your afraid of?  Some unknown?  You’re own weakness you see in someone else?  I don’t get it… and this is the one human motivation I’m struggling with the most at the moment.

I’m never honest about how I’m feeling… occasionally I get it out on here…. I’ve been “sick” not constantly for 12 months.  The treatment for my disease has decimated the rest of my body… I never wake up feeling well.  I never go to work feeling well.  I never come home feeling well and on the occasions I can sleep, I never fall asleep feeling well.  I hide behind things I can control and people see what they want to…. and I suppose I let them.  That’s the lesson here… when faced with a situation, people see what they want to see… not the truth.  And what a person sees isn’t necessarily reality.  Fear and hatred colour what we see and our decisions – even though I try and be the best person I can be – the same is true of me.  Sometimes I let me fear and hatred change what I see… and that’s something I’m trying to change about myself.

We are all born with one basic choice in this life – no matter what colour, or religion, or race you are.  And that choice is do I act on the better side of my nature or do I let the dark bits speak for me today….