Who Dares, Wins

"You need to have more confidence in yourself."

That phrase keeps coming back to haunt me, everywhere I go. My mom, my friends, everyone seems to be saying it.

Confidence.

Something someone has, and someone else doesn't, and the only difference between the two seems to be that one has it and one doesn't, and that seems to separate them into their respective fates.

To believe in yourself, that must be something. To have great ideas, to know they're worthwhile, then seeing yourself as worthwhile enough to implement them. That must be an experience worth anything. All I know is this, the most frustrating thing is to have great ideas and not be able to find anyone who's worthy of them, who will believe in them like you do, and implement them.

It's not that I'm afraid of the work. No, that isn't it at all. It's that I see other works I've done, fallen into the dust of history, so not even a passerby will notice them by the wayside.

Where does one come by confidence, that feeling that one can do something and do it well. I used to be bubbling over with it. I used to walk into a room and captain it, steer it wherever I willed, and it went. That was the rudder confidence used to give me.

It was my true strength, you see. I'm a person of large stature, and I've always felt proud of it, but my real strength was confidence. The ability to believe in myself when nobody else did.

It got me leads in plays my first year in High School and College. I was good at performing, and I didn't care if anyone else was too, because I knew that if I wasn't good enough, then I would get better and shortly would be.

Now I have to sell any ideas I have to someone else before I can ever believe in it.

To live in the past is to lose the present, they say, but I say sometimes the answers lie in the past. In what we were.

I was a Theater student, then. Son of the stage, walker on the boards. I could be anyone I wanted to be. It was all one big game of pretend. One day I started pretending in real life, too. I kept pretending until suddenly I hit on who I had always wanted to be.

I don't think most people ever experience what it's like to be who you've always wanted to be. I highly recommend it, if you ever find yourself in a place to try. But at the same time I must issue it with a warning. Once you become someone you admire, that you've always wanted to be, once you lose that person, it's as keen a loss as you've ever felt. It's like standing above your own grave.

Disturbing image, isn't it?

Show me the way back to confidence, o universe in which I dwell, and I will lead as I did once, and follow as I did once.

Giddy about a book

It's so fun for me to go to my public library. The one in Orem, UT is stacked floor to ceiling on three levels with books on every subject imaginable. One moment I'm looking into worlds of wonder, then learning about how they might be someday. My library is an adventure for me.

Before I start sounding like a bad public service announcement, (or maybe after) I'll shift gears a bit.

Learning. Knowledge. I've begun formulating a theory that true genius is the ability to apply knowledge from another, seemingly unrelated subject to the problem at hand. Making cars in a line. Running electricity through a filament. these are both examples of knowledge applied from outside sources.

To the true genius, learning to change a tire and rocket science are one and the same. If you think about it, everything can be broken down to it's smallest pieces. From there, it really isn't that hard. Building a rocket is really just a bunch of metal and fuel and stuff.

What do you think?

Thank you captain Dramatic!

I'm overly dramatic here, sometimes, I guess. It bothers me, or it did two seconds ago. Now, I just don't care what anyone else thinks. My blog is a place I can unload, create, and generally have a cathartic experience.

Lately, I've been wondering about my faces again. It seems so easy to be who I want to be here, online, using the words that shoot through my mind. I'm always afraid if I speak as I was taught, someone will look at me with a blankness in their eyes and say "Whadjoo say?"

I'm not trying to be arrogant here. Please don't misunderstand me. I have a lot of very intelligent friends who would completely grasp what I'm saying. I guess it really comes down to the fact that I'm a little afraid of standing out too much.

So I come here, to the vast wonders of the internet. I talk with friends the way I wish I could in real life. I'm so different here. Maybe a part of it is my surroundings.

I'm real here. I'm happy when I'm happy, sad when I'm sad, and angry when I'm angry.

I wonder if my friends that I talk to online even recognize the same person in real life. Crude, base, and simple. Thorough's self-imposed isolation begins to make some sense, as perhaps for some of us the only honest life is the one lived between the sheets...of paper, that is. ;)

If anyone knows how to bring a written life to the world of the third dimension, please feel free to share. I think the most disappointing thing is when you like yourself better when you log onto the net.

Crudity, simplicity, and commonality are just shields, I think. Shields for what we protect above all things, and that's ourselves.

Rage

There's a pressure behind my eyes. Electricity crackles loudly in the back of my brain. Power is screaming to get out.

But I'm just so tired.

So tired of not sleeping, so tired of being abandoned, so tired of fighting alone, watching beloved comrades fall or flee. It's me on the battlefront once again.

Maybe it's better this way. Maybe I'm stronger here, when it's me against the world.

If I must stand alone, at least I can still stand. If I must die, let it be on my feet, and let my enemy crush me to bits, for I won't stop fighting.

Fear, let him come with a knife for my back, but I'll see him face to face. Anxiety, he'll be there too, with razor's edge in hand. Self-doubt my all too constant companion, he knows my weaknesses well. Anger, I've kept him in check a long time, my ally and enemy in one. Unfocused thoughts, you've plagued me before, and I've beaten you every time. I've beaten all of you, time and time again.

If the robed harbinger must take me, like Cyrano and Wallace, he will take me in battle.

Do you even remember? Did the title of liberty ever touch you the way it does me? Do the words ring in your heart like knells in the tower, shaking your very soul?

It's perhaps a bad thing. To gain strength as I watch another walk away and say "I quit". It makes you look at yourself again. It reminds you of your heroes. Take your barren wastes of the world. Take your dead end pleasures, your broken hearted joys, and your lonesome endings.

Give me the shining streets of Heaven. Give me the way of the Almighty.