It has been a very long time since I have blogged. I have left Cambodia and made a home here in Thailand. For a long time I told family and friends that I didn’t blog because I had no words to say or a story to tell. This was so frequently dashing through the front of my mind, that I began to believe it myself. I began to believe that life here in Thailand, the journey I am on, isn’t a story worth telling. I began believing that the broken children I daily encounter or the adults so overcome with exhaustion; weren’t stories that people desired to hear. I fed into the lies that this broken world is something that is normal and therefore is not up for discussion. That lack of hope and burden are just regular everyday “things” that people get through and don’t really want to read about.
I questioned why would people want to read though the heartbreak of my daily life? My head fought and contemplated whether I should just write the happy stories. Whether only the good days were the important ones. The stories full of grace and joy; are these the only stories to be valued? A kind of story that when done makes one feel good. Makes one feel at peace with the world. Makes one feel comfortable in their life far a way engulfed in the mundane.
On the flip side a part of me knows that human nature desires sadness. We desire to feel pity and sadness for others. The sickening contempt knowing that someone somewhere else has it worse off, and finding twisted solace in that. The thing is what I write aren’t just stories. They aren’t made up and definitely aren’t stories to feel pity. They aren’t stories from some place across the world, but stories that have become part of me and my journey.
Today I dismiss this vow of silence that has bound my words to myself. I reject the false conception that these stories aren’t ones that are meant to be heard and reverberated and contemplated and treasured. They are so meant to be treasured. They should be treated just as that, because they aren’t made up. They are real. They are raw and I was entrusted with a piece of someone’s story that then became a part of my own, and now I entrust a part of me unto you.
I have a bracelet that my mom gave me that says “the day our life begins to end is the day that we become silent about the things that matter”. A vow of silence is a vow of stupidity and death; two things I refuse to let my life be consumed and captivated by. The raw-truthful-hard parts of life are going to be exposed, but know there is justice in speaking up against the wrong in the world and the darkness of the world because it is in the ugly-dark-hidden parts of life that the most light can shine.
Forever and always
JG
