Live, Lose, Love, All of the Above

A friend of mine wrote a blog today about telling the truth instead of just making it seem like everything is easy for you. Specifically, she’s talking about writing and getting published...and how that’s a long road with a lot of rejection along the way. She said:

How happy is an ending, after all, if you haven't witnessed all the long trials that led up to it?

This goes along with how I’ve been trying to live my life in the past year or so, trying to be open about my struggles and failures as well as the victories. Nobody really likes hearing from that friend who always has only good news, only great things that have happened to him. Don’t get me wrong – I love those stories and that kind of good news. But it means so much more when you know how hard someone has worked and how they’ve sweated and shed tears in the process of getting there.

Even as I type this, there’s this voice in my head saying, “Oh, you don’t want to put this on your blog. It’s not polished writing. It’s not profound. It’s not good enough.” But, you know what? Fear of not being good enough kept me in depression for five years. So fuck “not good enough.” It’s not going to stop me anymore from doing what my heart tells me to do, whether that’s publishing this blog entry or applying for a job I’m not perfectly qualified for or pursuing the woman who is everything I’ve been looking for my whole life.

And that reminds me of a song my friend Jake wrote years ago. The chorus went like this:
Live, lose, love, all of the above.
When push comes to shove, do what it takes to stay free, oh yeah.

Because you can’t truly have one of those without the others.