Soft Inside

Soft Inside

“Did you just call me a wuss?” -Jerry Seinfeld

 

I am drawn to fighters, film stars, and gangsta rappers who project self-assured strength. And who are happy with who they are. They don’t need to change they are at the top of the evolutionary pyramid. They got it all. They don’t need Tony Robbins. It’s just them: all they need. Not even God. Inside I suffer from a depression. I hate it though; I’d rather be strong. Teach me how John Wayne!

My mother would always coddle me, let me be weak, let me give up, so I had to look out from behind her apron strings.

A few years ago, I would cry all the time, breaking down emotionally and whine over what my life was. I watched myself from outside myself. I narrowed my eyes and sharpened my brows at this blotchy-faced bloated sack of sad. A man does not do this, a human being does not do this. I don’t want to be carried; I want to lift others atop my broad shoulders. I’m certainly not advocating being a robot, but helping out and healing the pain of others.

I wanted to be the hero, not the damsel in distress.

It’s still there but making others smile with their full faces, eases my heart more than just crying about my own circumstance. In service to others.

It didn’t take long for me to be repelled by the depression of others. I worked with this young man let us call him, Don Cornelius, he suffered from the darkness and wasn’t afraid to dim others. I avoided Don and stayed looking elsewhere at the strong. Covering my ears, la la la, I can’t hear you crying!

The greatest fighter of all time, Georges St. Pierre, talked about how he was terrified each walk to the Octagon. Yet he was able to perform. In my view that is tough. Performing to spit in the face of his inner terrors.

Loser. If my thoughts are who I really am. Winner. If I am my actions. Measure by action not feeling. You are what you do. I fake it till I make it. Can I make it already? Do I ever get to feel like a grown up? Do I always feel like a scared little boy within?

If you act scared who is going to hire you? Who is going to promote you? We’re all trying to win; we can’t wander the cities with no destination shielded by our headphones all the time.

My skipping burned CDs of DMX, and Eminem taught me how to be a man. Needless to say, it might have been a strange masculinity. It involved a lot of barking and Just-Don’t-Giving-A-Fucks. That was the projection.