Ladders And Scales

In a world of so much excess , it should come as no surprise that people are expected to perform, and to supply with others, an almost godlike set of qualities in order to be even considered for the worth of another. We have wrongly assumed,simply by our socioeconomic environment, that bigger is always better, and that the more you have, or can take, proves by default that you are a better person for it. Stronger, faster, more expensive, decadent, or grandiose, but never whether it does what you needed it to do in the first place.
But emotions are not an 'all or nothing'. To have complete mastery of a single emotion is to only have half of the whole. Every emotion has an opposite, and mastery of that opposite as well, is to be able to see emotions as the scale pans that must be balanced in order to achieve the full weight or worth of either one. Most people see their emotions, and what comes of them as ladders rather than scales. Where everything must be climbed and attained without ever understanding the opposite.
This ridiculous concept of 'bigger and better',seems to look toward the people who exemplify massive potential in one aspect while completely ignoring the fact that it is pointless to admire potential in that which can not move; the objects of our admiration or their supposed power completely obscuring their utility by simply being to large to look around. Like a monster truck that can not move, or a Super Size Meal that's too big to eat, or even a house that becomes too much of a wallet biting eyesore to ever become a home.
But still we are still supposed to be impressed. Powerful men of wealth and position who have no ability to apply emotional conviction to that which can not be bought or sold,and beautiful and vacuous super models who can dangle the promise of sexual fulfillment like Tantalus's grapes at our fingertips without ever allowing people to see the dagger at our throats that sells subservience to beauty in the same way hundred dollar bills do to a common street prostitute.
In a world of social climbers, our scales are ignored for a forest of ladders to which we perch emotions and abilities that have little use at all on their own; Bulging chest muscles that can be oiled and flexed for the admiration of the people who live in their heads but haven't got the endurance to do anything more than waste a day in a gym and be too exhausted and depleted to mow the lawn. Or people who claim their dedication to their job and the ability to provide while leaving hearts and souls in a virtual vacuum to be used in the way they see fit and not how they are needed by another.
For all of the emotions that we wish to feel, there is another with which it must be accountable to and tempered with. And when a person is seen as a collection of imposing ladders, remember that they can't be used for anything else. They are simply elevated without being balanced. All or nothing and nothing because they are not all without the other half.
If emotions and feelings are to be seen as filling both sides of a scale, it should also be seen that these scales do not rest on the tables alone. There are many scales just as there are many ladders, but the pans of each scale should overlay each other; each pan above or below another scale with the ability to influence that emotion or ability as well. The small amounts of one emotion tilting the next that is filled or lessened by yet a third.
But in a world of ladders, no matter how many a person may seem to possess, they are still only half of a person when it comes to the ability to rely on movement. Ladders do not move, and they are not supposed to. It is not the fault of the emotion that it has been set alone on a ladder and expected to do anything more than hold it. It is the fault of the person who elevated it to that spot to be admired without allowing others to see that it had no use on its own. And when it comes to relying on that emotion to be a fluid thing, and it comes up short, should it come as no surprise that when these people are seen for what they truly are, and those who admire them are asked how happy they are, they always come up with something like "I feel like I am only half of a person."? Of course you are. You were led to believe that there was a full range of ability in something you were trained to see only half of. That simply having it was enough without asking yourself, or being told, that it means absolutely nothing if it isn't allowed to be tempered or tilted to fit to a situation without falling apart.
You do not get to tout your ability to talk if you do not know how to listen, and by failing to be able to accomplish both (not just one or the other) you do not get the right to be able to say you communicate. You do not get to feel real genuine love if you can not sacrifice, nor do you have it in return if it can not be recognized. You can not claim to be courageous without fear, and if you can, then you can not be brave or courageous. You are stupid. You can not trust if you are not willing to set yourself up be destroyed and know that you won't. You can not know pride if you tolerate hubris as an excuse. You can not have worth if you are not valued. You can not know comfort if there is even remote fear. All of these are dependent on either the understanding of the differences or the ability to make one accountable for what it affects others.
Most importantly, you simply can not gain the full admiration and love of another person if you are towering above them on a ladder, nor can you assume you love another if you are expected to be immovable to be what they need. Change is the only constant. The only change that occurs in immovable things is decay, the rate of which is directly proportional to the veracity of the components to which it is continually subjected. Some people in this world would like to think that by building one ladder high enough that it will make it possible to ignore the other side of the emotion altogether, and to overcompensate for something you are very capable of while not being able to nurture its opposite still only results in half a person. How do you measure the worth of effort if it comes effortlessly?
Maybe what we need to do is stop looking at the height of an emotion and, instead start becoming aware of and valuing more, the number of those qualities and their length and breadth instead. To start realizing that it is simply not enough to say bigger is better if it doesn't do what it is supposed to accomplished without the other component. But I guess I am preaching to the choir on this one, aren't I? Those who are half a person in and of themselves will appeal to another who is half what they should be. Both will have an excess of that which they do not need in the other, and will ignore it just as long as they get the part they want. And to achieve the one or two things they want from another will ignore half of them as well, regardless of whether it is needed by them or not. How ironic. Two people, only half of their potential, cutting away another half of themselves to be admired by another who cuts away still another half to tolerate them.
And all because they couldn't see the need of the forest for the tree that obscured the view.

I don't want this to sound like this is everyone, though. Because for everything that we get raised to believe and trained to endure, and then indoctrinated and trapped into being by not knowing the difference, there are just as many people who are finding that just because we have been doing it for half of our lives, does not necessarily mean that we have to continue in it. It is a long slow walk out of the forest of ladders, and the wish for a wider expanse of emotions, like fields of grass, takes a bit of time to get to. Small careful steps are steps just the same, and a journey is no less meaningfull if it is done with more care taken to safe passage than by the speed to which it is accomplished.
I myself, have learned that I have fallen victim to a few too many ladders in my life and been unable to get my scale pans out from under the rungs of ladders that I am not so impressed with anymore. The parts of me that I cut away to make myself more appealing to someone else is much like cutting away the scale pans to make room for ladders that are doing more to verify the wants of someone else to have their ladder than it is allowing me to be able to fluctuate and move the scales I thought I could do without.
I am not going to be lost in a sea of ladders anymore. I am going to reclaim more and more of my own scales and look to have them do what they are intended to do for both me and people I choose to fill my life.
I have come to find that people who rest their lives on top of ladders that are too high for me to reach, let alone use or appreciate, are simply not concerned with my needs to have a more movable relationship. And if they have become so sure of themselves atop those ladders that they fail to recognize me as a collection of scales beneath them, then so be it. It is no longer my wish to be accountable to or guilty or shameful for the ladders they feel are important if they are not going to understand that my need to be understood as a more complete person requires me to reclaim on my own, the emotions and feelings that were not wanted, or that became unnecessary to them. But that are absolutely critical to me.
As I grow older,though, I have learned that far too many of these emotions that I said I would sacrifice, are now, not going to be ignored. Not because they will not, but can not. I have tried, and the plain truth of the matter, regardless of how I say that it does not matter is a complete and total lie to myself. I am worth just as much as anyone else. If someone else was worth what I sacrificed of myself, then how do I rationalize their right to those sacrifices over mine with no difference in the value of people in general? To allow one to take of me and have it be acceptable is to ask the same thing in return with equal with no difference in worth as a soul. And if that means that I have to set my scales up and balance them between the rungs of previous ladders, then so be it. But I need them, and if the lofty perches atop ladders have put their heads so far up into the clouds that I am no longer needed to do anything but support it for them, and not myself or my happiness, then I need to go and find a deeper peace and happiness with someone who can.
I am sure that some people will scoff and judge me a horrible person for erecting my scales beneath the rungs of ladders already there, but how is it any different if I am willing to live with a higher awareness of emotional involvement and feel it more wholly in a place where It shouldn't be, than it is to live with a lack of it where it should be and is not? All things being equal, I should be able to be just as angry and judgmental for being required and forced into an emotional vacuum as they may feel I deserve for me finding it where I do. If I am to be damned either way, then I will choose to damn myself with just one injustice to another rather than scores of them against myself for pretending.
Keep your ladders and do with them what you will, but not at the expense of my own heart. I will use my own scales and nestle them with whoever, and wherever, I wish. Do not be veangeful or critical of a another person who has seen fit to love unconditionally what you left at your feet as unnecessary. You didn't want it when you asked me to be blinded by your ladders, nor did you feel the need to carry it to the top of mine. What is felt and needed by someone else should be of no concern to the one who felt no need to require it or nurture it, and if they care for it the way I wish it to be, then that is mine to feel.

The Blog Disclaimer

Every time I start a new journal or blog, I write a disclaimer for all of the things that you may find in it. I am a very polite and respectful person in public, and have been known to bend over backwards to avoid confrontation for my views if it will improve the situation on the whole, but I am also not a person to be made mute and impotent altogether because of my ability to be polite in a place where, by all rights, you should have had your teeth slapped out of your head. Instead, I wait.
When I was in high school, I was dragged into the principals office for writing stories that I suppose could be referred to as "Columbine-esque". They were rude, and brutally honest, and full of anger and frustration and rage. The only difference, however, between me and every other mindless drone they tried to manufacture, was that I knew that it was more beneficial to write what I felt inside rather than be an outward bitch or insensitive asshole instead.
Well they would have NONE of that kind of thinking. Apparently, creative writing should be structured to make it as pointless as possible. No thought or insight just so long as we jumped the proverbial hoop. I was accused of sex when I hadn't had it yet, violence I had absolutely no ability or desire to perform, crimes that had not been comitted, and associations with people who I had never met. All because it was written. It wasn't until years later that someone read my journal and commented that everything I wrote was exactly how they felt at the time but were too afraid or ashamed to say.
And that is sad.
What I write is what I think. That's all. I try as hard as I can to keep exactly what I think and feel to come out in a way that it can be understood by another person....but not necessarily agreed with. I don't write for approval of my position. I write to make an awareness of it. What you decide to do with what I write or feel is entirely up to you. HOW I go about it, however, is not up to you.
I will swear and curse and use four letter explitives at will. Not because I have to, but because that is what comes out. I will praise and at the same time insult everything about each and every one of us. Your identity, your religion, your ethnicity, your ethics, your moralities, everything. And I will do the same to myself.
The truth is something that this world seems to not have much use of. Not if it can be sacrificed for something else. Cut and dried definitions are skewed into completely irrational configurations to justify the most assinine of situations. And maybe that is just the way of the world. But just because a person is trained or forced to not notice that there is an elephant in the cupboard, does not mean that I should have to ignore it all the time in every situation. There will come a time and a place where I will walk away from the cupboard and the elephant of lies and falsehoods, and make my own assumptions about what is right and wrong with the world. It seems to me that we have spent too much time listening to the truths of other people without asking ourselves how they came to the conclusions anyway. We gave them the chance to make what was said and done be the same thing, and they fucked it up. So instead, I offer the ability to state my point of view even if I can't change it, by what and how I write.
So read it with an open mind, because I wrote it with one. Don't agree with it if you don't want to, but don't make me pretend truth and where I do not believe it exists by having me right what feels good. Life isn't fair.
A Liar taught me that.