Contrast

There's always two sides to every story.

Or at best, there's always part of if you never knew.

One person's pleasure is another person's pain.

One man's loss is another man's gain.

You can know someone so well, like the back of your hand, and still get a surprise every now and then.

In life, we have to compare what we think we know against what is possibly, or probably, the truth.

I was ignorant to think that my selfish actions could be divided from the personal experiences of those around me.

And now I sit here on the floor, God only knows what coursing through my body, I begin to realise that.

Doing what you want to do, you're going to hurt people.

No matter what you do in life, someone is going to get hurt.

I suppose it's all about choosing the path of the greatest utility, maximising the good for everyone.

Or is it wrong to make your own personal decisions based on your own personal motives.

I trace over my skin, fingering the lines of my tattoo.

I chose the yin-yang as a representation of balance and duality; recognising both sides to every story.

I've lost sight of that goal in some ways, I think. I guess that's why I had it tattooed into my skin; to remind me of the values that I try to uphold in my everyday life.

Put it all together; the dark and light, the black and white, the wrong and the right.

Everything you do is significant and important.

Make sure it's the right decision for yourself, but make sure you know how it effects everyone else.

Chapters

Every so often in life, something huge and life-changinly significant happens, and we all sit around in shock and think, "It's strange how quickly one event can change your whole life".

But in the past 72 hours, I've noticed that it's not always the big things that change you.

A series of seemingly small and meaningless events collaborated over the course of a weekend to change my perspective on the world quite substantially, to the point where I was genuinely shocked as a reflected on how I felt about my life 3 days ago.

It wasn't as much an emotional roller-coaster as it was a stroll around the scenic route.

I went from excited, to content, to confused, to anxious, to relieved, to complacent, to disappointed and hurt, resignation, pleasure, and perhaps even a tinge of regret.

All mixed in with copious amounts of alcohol (which may or may not be a contributing factor to my perceived problem).

But the changes in emotion were so smooth and subtle that I never really acknowledged them to myself.

It wasn't until it was all over that I realised the past 3 days had been one large significant event in themselves.

Although I suppose that's all life really is: a series of ever-changing circumstances.

Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don't.

But you will always feel them.

It felt like I was only between chapters, when in reality I was coming up to the end of the story.

Luckily there's still time for a sequel, keeping some of the old favourites, but hopefully introducing a whole batch of new characters (and eliminating the ones that simply failed to further the plot).

and so continues the comedy/drama narrative that is my life.

but The Story of Us will only ever be a chapter in the The Story of Me.

"the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now" - Taylor Swift

Other

Potentially revisiting an old topic here, but it's just something that's been playing on my mind recently.

One thing I will never understand in the apparent quarrels, and even fears, that some gay people have at the ideas of anything "hetero-normative"; basically, conventions or other standards and ideals that are upheld in a generally 'straight' community.

I don't think it's a bad thing that the general community has these 'straight' values; after all, they are a majority in the people.

But also, I think it's kind of narrow-minded to think of these values as inherently straight at all.

Especially from a group of people who seemingly want equality and tolerance among the broad scope of sexual orientation.

There's no denying that there is a rich and complex variety of colourful people in the gay community.

You've got drag queens, leather daddies, dykes on bikes, lipstick lesbians, underage twinks, fetish guys with more piercings than you can shake a dick at; huge variety of people who lead crazy lifestyles that deviate substantially from the perceived 'norm'.

However, it would be a mistake to think that the ability to lead such potentially wild and hedonistic lifestyles stem from the fact that they are queer-identifiying.

There are just as many straight people who have fucked up lives full of extraordinary events that don't commonly happen in everyday life.

I had a guy say to me once: "Don't be all normal and boring, like the hetero's".

At the time I laughed and shook the comment off, but the more I think about it, the more infuriating it becomes.

The notion that all hetero's are "boring and conventional" is almost as stupid and narrow-minded as the idea that all gay people are crazy sex freaks who are incapable of leading lives with any degree or 'normality'.

Because for some people, there's nothing that special about being gay; it's a minor facet of the bigger picture, and they don't put much emphasis on it.

Although normality is such a subjective term that that argument almost means next to nothing.

I'm all for recognising differences, but they're not the things that we should be focusing on.

This process of Othering between sexual orientation does nothing for any equality movements.

I'm proud to be gay, and I do have some pretty crazy fucked up life experiences.

Some of them happened as a direct result of my homosexuality, but that doesn't mean I don't a crave a little bit of conventional normality every now and then too.

And any gay person who thinks that their purpose in life is to be the antithesis of heterosexuality seriously needs to re-evaluate their priorities.

Freedom

There's always a calm before a storm.

But in the words of Katy Perry, "after a hurricane comes a rainbow."

Not that my life doesn't resemble the personification of a rainbow in most cases.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for soul mates and eternal happiness with the one you love.

But I think there's a part of you that you lose when you're in a relationship.

Maybe when you find "the one", that part is replaced with the matching piece of your partner.

But if that's not the case, breaking up and re-discovering that lost piece is absolutely amazing.

I still feel the heartache of breaking up, and probably always will, whenever it happens.

But every cloud has silver lining, and pulling myself out of that rut to see the sunshine of freedom is such an intense feeling of liberation.

I would much rather get on with being that guy turning multiple heads (and kissing them too) in the club, which I've really always been, instead of wasting time being the desperate soul who sits around banging on about "What if...", "Why me?" and "What the Hell went wrong?"

So what are you waiting for? If your glass is even so much as half-empty, grab that vodka or bourbon or a damn martini and fill it the fuck back up!

"so if you're too school for cool

and you treat me like a fool

you can choose to let it go

we can always party on our own..

so raise your glass if you are wrong

in all the right ways" - P!nk

Love

First and foremost, I believe in love.

You'd probably be right if you called me crazy, or said I was a dreamer.

I listen to my heart before my head, and more often then not I'll make my decisions based on a feeling rather than any rational logic.

It might seem self-interested and hedonistic, but I can assure you that such wild and fantastical thinking incurs just as much pain as it does pleasure.

How could something, or someone, that fills you with so much joy and happiness, also inadvertently break your heart into tiny little pieces?

That, I believe, is the great paradox of love.

Some would say I fell hard and fast, and maybe there is some truth in that.

But I think it's hard for anyone but myself to see the caution I exercised when approaching this love.

Shame on you if you fool me once, shame on me if you fool me twice: that kind of thing.

Every time Kingdom Hearts is shattered into rubble, I build the walls up twice as high and doubly thick.

But sometimes there's something, or someone, worth the risk, and for once I find myself breaking down the walls, letting someone in.

And I fell in love; at least I thought I did.

But in the words of Gretchen Weiners: "You could be wrong".

It's not that he didn't love me at all; simply that he didn't love me in the same way.

And truth is one of the most important ingredients in the elixir of love.

Is it wrong to suggest that an unequal, unreciprocated love is tantamount to no love at all?

Were my feelings wasted on a chemistry that never came to boil?

Was I ever in love if I was only ever, in that sense, by myself?

I'll never know the answers to these questions, though if someone asked me if I've ever been in love, now I would most likely answer 'yes'.

For all I've come to believe in, to aspire to, and to know; for all intents and purposes, I would say that I have loved.

Or at the very least, that what I did, the choices I made, the risks I took, the joys I cherished and the losses I suffered: they were all in the name of a greater good.

In the hope that one day, truly, I may fall in love.

"won't forget, can't regret what I did for love" - A Chorus Line

Drowning

Sometimes, I feel like enlightenment is a curse.

It's crossed my mind whether there's really a quantifiable difference between believing a lie, and simply not knowing the truth.

Maybe I was wrong; perhaps ignorance is bliss.

I'm sitting here in a library; a place of knowledge, filled with so much factual text, information and intelligence, and people studying these volumes and presumably bringing themselves to some of elevated awareness, higher and intelligent.

And it's dawned on me that I've never felt so out of place.

I live my life in a sort of limbo.

Some people find that purpose they have in life, no matter how mundane, and they do it.

They work, they play, they have fun; they don't tend to venture beyond the boundaries or their normal existence, but that's okay with them.

They're content with their lot in life. They're all set.

Then there are people who, similarly, feel they have some goal in life, yet conversely have to spend years of their life immersing themselves in some chosen aspect, vastly broadening their horizons so they can achieve their ultimate passion.

I know for a fact that I'm neither.

I stepped into the outer world, into the waters of intellect and skill.

I just don't know how to swim.

I don't have a purpose. I don't have a passion. I don't have a goal.

I'm struggling to stay afloat, and the shore's nowhere in sight.

What if this was all a big mistake?

There's so much in my life that I don't understand, but I feel like I would have been happier if I'd never known it was there.

Like not being able to not see the trick to an optical illusion, things will never look the same to me. I don't know how it will ever be like it was before, yet I still struggle to make sense of what it is now.

Worst of all is I feel as though I'm wasting my time. I'm stuck in this strange place where I obviously don't belong.

And there's no way out.

"I've watched you fly on paper wings, halfway around the world

until they burned up in the atmosphere, sent you spiralling down

landing somewhere far from here with no one else around" - Rise Against

Confessions

I've always been an advocate for the truth.

There's nothing I hate than master class deception, and sometimes I even let little white lies get the better of my temperament.

Sometimes a lie is told out of malice and spite; the worst kind.

Sometimes it's told out of fear of the consequences of the truth.

A little more understandable, but in the long run the impact is probably much the same.

Yet concealment, no matter how big or small, leads to confession; an act which in itself can be very liberating and empowering.

I know form experience that certain confessions are extremely difficult.

My breathing gets all out of whack, and I feel my chest get so heavy because I've apparently forgotten to exhale.

But when you finally spit it out, there is a consequence, a react, and the ball starts rolling.

But what of self-confession?

Something you know, deep-down in your heart, but something that you can't bear to acknowledge.

Something you'd rather bury than accept.

No matter how difficult it might be to verbalise my most clandestine feelings, it's confronting myself with my deepest, darkest fears that is the hardest part of any confession.

Because they're usually the things you don't want to hear.

They're usually about the things you pretended weren't real.

And they usually come with the terrifying aspect that everything as you know it could change.

However, as terrifying as they are, these kinds of confessions tend to be the most fulfilling.

They bring with them the degree of acceptance that lets you "move on".

I've written many a blog on change, and how ultimately it can be a positive force. You shouldn't try to stand in it's way.

But sometimes, it's gentle, and waits for your permission.

All you have to do is say the word.

A simple confession is all it takes.

"guess I'm wish my life away

with these things I'll never say" - Avril Lavigne