Tender heart

Misunderstood

Someone is harsh

Yet I can make it through

Pain is hard to bear all alone.

Are you truly loved if you can be in pain and someone who says they love you does not take your pain seriously?

Life is suffering sometimes and there are ways through every pain if you don’t resist the lesson the pain is there to teach.

But it is hard hard hard to be in pain and try to find relief through connection but you cannot find the person who will connect with you and be with you through it.

That person does not exist. At least that person cannot be found as I cast about.

Loving, eager, hopeful for love’s return. Slammed door in face. Other people more important than me.

Always other people more important than me. I want to change that, just have not yet. Will stay optimistic. Will keep believing it is possible and I just have not found it yet. I might be that important to someone, someday. I have to believe. For now I can only get comfort in the belief that it might happen, not that it has happened yet.

Here are the possibilities. Visual art both acrylic and watercolor. Play the violin, ukelele, and keyboard. Read about critical theory. Caliban and the Witches for one. Paint a mural in the kitchen. Paint the living room purple. Write on the LOBG.

I am continuing to read the book The West, A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoíse Mac Sweeney and it is still so good. Right now I am on chapter 9 which is talking about Njinga of Angola, a smart and powerful albeit ruthlessly savage West African leader who negotiated against Portuguese colonialism and stayed strong. There is an additional narrative about her converting to Catholicism, but it is unclear whether her doing so is a story written by a Catholic to serve the Catholic narrative.

My other book is Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk, and it is surprisingly atmospheric, engaging, and relatable. It involves the politics of the Turkish/Greek world in the early 1900’s and it appears to give some human perspective for both the Orthodox Christians and the Muslims of that time.

The first book is The West, A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoise Mac Sweeney. From the jacket:

“The concept of “the West” is present in every daily interaction you have, from entertainment and politics to world markets and world history. This engagingly intimate history will reshape the way you see the world around you. At this moment of civilizational redefinition, if we are to chart a future for the West, we must properly understand its past.

From Herodotus, a mixed-race migrant, to Phillis Wheatley, and enslaves African American who became a literary sensation; and from William Ewart Gladstone, with a private passion for epic poetry, to the medieval Arab scholar Al-Kindi, Mac Sweeney’s chosen subjects are a mind-expanding blend of unsungh heroes and familiar faces viewed afresh. These characters span the millennia and the continents, representing different religions, varying levels of wealth and education, diverse traditions and nationalities. Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed- and why we’ve misunderstood it for too long.

An urgently needed emergent voice in big history, in her groundbreaking retelling of the human narrative, Naoise Mac Sweeney debunks the myths and origin stories that underpin the history we thought we knew.”