What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

I have been dinged for calling my web site “Stories That Are All True,” because when they aren’t angry, they understand that I am talking about the fact that there’s truth in a lesson whether it happened or not. For instance, Abraham and Jesus are little more than legend and we take their truths as self evident most of the time. We do not discount the things we hold in our hearts because we cannot prove they are factual. I want people to feel the same way about my writing- that these stories cannot possibly be objective truth because I’m just writing down my own inner monologue. Just because I say there’s a correlation or a causation doesn’t mean it’s true. It means that’s what I think/feel/realize. As I know more, so does this web site. I do not have a specific arc in mind, because I am reflecting my life as it happens. I cannot reflect on another person’s life as it happens, and it is astounding how many people not only think I can, but should.

I am guessing everyone’s feelings all the time, because I am working things out in my head, trying to get my own clarity before the next time I interact with that person. I also allow myself to get angry, because that emotion is also in the human spectrum. Do you know why God is so angry in the Old Testament? That’s the story we told, not God. It was not objectively true, but that’s how the people felt. Nowhere in the Bible is there an argument for or against God- it is only those people’s reflections of what God means to them. Humans are angry, ergo God is angry. Humans are destructive, therefore God is destructive, etc. As society progressed, it was a theology of promise and not cruelty.

You’ll see me go through the same thing on this Web site because I am not writing stories about people. I am writing stories about my reactions to people. Nowhere in this blog is an argument that anyone is definitively a good or bad person. That’s because no one is. My good or bad interaction with them is not their whole being, and my opinion carries no inherent respect. I am not an authority on anything, and I do not put myself out there as such. I have told you that I never finished college, that every job I’ve ever had has been a nightmare, that my personal relationships fall apart early and often, etc. Nowhere in this web site am I saying that I’m a good person to emulate….. But I’m not NOT saying it, either. I have my moments. I have my wins. I have insights on things that other people don’t. But the beauty and truth is in the eye of the reader, not the writer. As in, I only control what I meant, I do not control what you get out of it.

Speaking of wins, I had one this week. I smiled when I thought about the fact that when Supergrover told me I was a lot, I told her to go find less. I know enough to know that she’ll never meet anyone like me in her entire life, and all this time I thought I was the only one in that boat. That I’d never find anyone like her. I couldn’t bring myself enough self-esteem to believe she was actually losing anything. I had to go to a really dark place and come back from it to realize that She’s on my wavelength. Her brain works as fast or faster than mine. When you meet someone like that, who raises your game, it becomes hard to go back to less. I had to realize that was true on both sides of the equation. Not interacting doesn’t mean not missing each other. I have said this before, that you are 100% allowed to miss someone you’ve cut out of your life. I cut her out of my life when she stopped seeing my worth, and assuming I meant the worst while reading from her own self-esteem instead of saying, “that really hurt because X.” The reason it’s reading from your own self esteem is assuming that X is what I intended you to pick up when you read. Saying to me that you were hurt because of X allows me to say, “I’m so sorry you were hurt. That is not what I meant to imply, but I can see how you got there. Here’s what I actually meant.” Hopefully, it’s a two minute problem to solve. What’s not a two minute problem to solve is reading my work from your self esteem for years and assuming what my opinion actually is.

I do not need our friendship to be dependent on your reading comprehension skills. I need you to tell me what you heard, because that may or may not have been what I actually meant. I saw a meme on Facebook that spoke to this. It said, “English teachers put more meaning into a novel than a writer does.” My comment was “Yes. Sometimes a red dress is taking down the patriarchy. Sometimes, it’s just that ‘red’ is easier to type.” Because I am a blogger, these English teacher interpretations kill friendships.

Red was just easier to type.