We Are in a Different Kind of War Now
I’ve never read Kurt Vonnegut before tonight. It was by chance that I read him at all. I try to avoid reading things written about the things I like to write about because of the chance that they’ll have said it better than I could and all my efforts will mean nothing.
After 54 pages I feel like this man left a window open for me. He says Hamlet was a masterpiece because it told the truth. People loved it because no one was telling the truth. And maybe the truth doesn’t win the crowd on opening night but anyone can tell when they are around it. They come around.
I texted her to thank her for the book. I had many thoughts.
“I really missed out by not being in the war. All the great writers were in the war.”
“Hmm, we are in a different war now…..”
“…..You have enough mind wars going on.”
I very much hate when people give me advice. I don’t like any type of feedback other than praise and not just ‘good job’ praise but whatever I provided was the best that had ever been provided to them praise. I’ve learned to let it (feedback) in of course because that is what separates me from being a half-talented asswipe that builds a lifetime’s supply of mediocre work, and mediocre because I never took the time to really commit, from a man capable of creating something meaningful and walking into a room full of strangers and carrying that meaning in my eyes.
But sometimes just the right friend says just the right thing and you search long and hard for the right sequence of emojis to depict a bomb going off in your head. I’m still wearing the same sweatshirt but I am no longer the same person.
We have a choice – we can discover ourselves in a way that might be currently unpopular and possibly never be recognized until we are half past dead at which point everyone we have ever come in contact with will show up at our funeral and they’ll all cry because we were that one person that truly moved them and they never got the chance to thank us, or we can do all the right things and not mean anything to anyone that means anything themselves.
The war is happening every day. It happens when we know something doesn’t fit yet we do it anyway. When we let imaginary hands pin us on carpet and think that we can’t just stand back up and go outside and be who we want to be.
We can do whatever we want. But we don’t. We are at war.