Breaking Up With Fear and Conformity

This is a breakup letter. I am breaking up with fear.

This story was originally posted in Off-Guardian.

Data’s rotten,
Tests are toast.
News is sullen,
Coast to coast.

Feudal darkness
Here and now!
To the masters
Peasants bow.

Facts are fiction,
Love is screen.
Gossip’s trending,
Trends are mean.

Hear, hear,
Where’s the joy?
Ask Alexa.
She’ll annoy.

This is a breakup letter. I am breaking up with fear.

Farewell, my clean and proper friends. I’ve had enough. I am not interested in your scarecrows and rules of good behavior.

I did my time inside the cage, and now I intend to breathe.

Your air is stale with gossip and anxiety. It’s suffocating. It’s low on oxygen. I can’t.

Your safe space is for crippled animals.

I feel bad for you but I don’t owe you self-abuse.

I really can’t do this anymore. I tried and tried and tried—but my fear is no more, and it’s time to say good bye. It’s not me, it’s you. The heroes you pray to insist that I betray my heart and intellect. I can’t do that. I am not a slave. You do it if you want but you have to let me be.

Perhaps I’ve never belonged in the cage of good behavior. Perhaps, I’ve always been unshackled.

This world is full of love and beauty.

This world does not belong exclusively to you or whomever has hurt you and made you proudly, complacently obedient.

You are not the owner of everyone’s descriptions of things and ways to think. My relationship with language, with the mystery of life and with the physical world around us is important to my heart, and you don’t have any say in that.

Thus, your influence over my language is over. Your convictions and hangups have nothing to do with me.

So please do what’s best for you, and I’ll do the same, with love and hope for truth. I wish you well, and I am not scared of your ghosts.

If I can be of help to you in a dignifying way that doesn’t require my self-betrayal, I am around with all good vibes. Just don’t hate me for not kneeling before your fears.

I feel like a kid again, free from adult confusions, curious about everything, attracted to freedom and aliveness, and drawn to my fellow travelers whose spirits are pure and whose minds are interesting.

Please spare me the shaming and the boring Pravda-like clichés, they won’t convince me, they will only prolong the agony of parting.

I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire life. Farewell.

We’ll meet again.

(Thank you!)