I’m at a loss for what to write about.

My brain is full but I’m still chewing on things, figuring out how I feel.

I got a text the other day with an article.  It doesn’t matter what it was about, but there was no context provided.  Just an article, out of nowhere, from a person I haven’t spoken to recently.  But I understood by the headline that it was an article about a commonality between us.

I opened it and read the first paragraph or two.  I responded with an emoji, because I agreed with the article.  I was familiar with the subject, and I’d read many things about it over the past few years.  I knew how I felt.

My friend’s response was that perhaps the article got it wrong.  I sighed and realized I’d have to read the whole thing to properly respond.

So I did.  And my feelings didn’t change.  I knew how I felt about the situation.  I’d both read articles and observed/gathered my own impressions.  I felt how I felt, and while I was open to a discussion, I wasn’t ready to change my mind.  This specific article did not add anything new to the conversation or give new information.

That was a moment when I knew exactly what to write and how I felt.

That is not the case today.  I’m tired and my brain is full of so many things.  Thoughts about how life is, how we put people in boxes and try desperately to keep them there.  How we are not open to change, we are not willing to see other people as different than who they’d always been in our own minds.

Except when it suddenly becomes socially acceptable to allow that someone has ‘matured’ or ‘evolved.’

It’s a tough nut for me to be chewing on.  It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge my own biases and even more difficult to contemplate that perhaps, I am wrong.  Not always, but not seldom, either.  If I am asking grace of others, if I am working and always learning and changing, I have to grant that others are doing the same.  And that is very difficult in certain cases.

As an example: must I be open to my ex-husband being a better person than the one who treated me badly, ripped me apart and left me shattered?  Isn’t it easier and more comforting to continue to believe that he’s awful?  …. I mean, easier, yes, but fair?  Not at all.  And if I want to keep growing, I must admit that just as I’m constantly evolving, so is everyone else, including that man.  Otherwise I haven’t evolved or grown at all.  I have just judged.  Possibly unfairly.

Oof.

Yuck.

Asking others for grace means giving it myself.  And that’s the hardest part, isn’t it?  Learning and understanding that everything is a two way street.

Xox, g