Splinter bear rage

I asked a friend why I care so much about the people who seem to have disappeared when I needed some help. Why are they silent and feel nothing for me. The answer is at the core of my recent journey. I felt desperation and hopelessness of such depth and completeness for the first time but this is normal for a lot more people than I realize.

Somehow I'm snapping out of it and feel such energy and inspiration now. I'm free to see life clearly. And all that was removed was the pain of changing bad habits, dealing with my fears, my prejudices... These are things we tell kids all the time and as a man of 50, I'm still perplexed by such simple "splinters".

The only difference between the me of today and the kid inside is access to money, autonomy, people and opportunity. It should make things easier but it often does not. If our problems are so complicated and unsolvable, we have every excuse to be sad or miserable and whine. If you are powerful and have many followers, the whining turns into the roar or a bear with a painful splinter in his toe but his paws are too big to dispel it.

Maybe some of my old friends are like that. They are themselves sad and hopeless deep inside, have learned to build a sophisticated shell to enclose the problem and ignores the contradiction making the simple solutions elusive. It takes so much effort to look good without feeling like it.

Over the past year when dealing with my deep angst coincided with the healing of my foot, I saw what is me and what is the shell I hid behind. I learned to love the person I had compromised gradually by conforming to some imagined image of me I thought other people wanted. It sounds so stupid just writing it. Sometimes I am also that bear that whines and roars. And then I wonder why I felt such rage because of some stupid simple encounter.

So I'm not angry at my deserted friendships. Maybe they will come back or I'll make new ones. Most important is that removing the splinters in my life is leaving a calmer, more secure and bold man. This is freedom!