November 14th, 2011

Well, I wasn't sure how to start this, so I thought use the intro to my new book Grin and Bare It (© 2011) Purposefully short and funny, this book gets people to read some thoughts without having their guards up...presenting some rather unexpected thoughts on the state of love in the 21st century, you could say. I feel called to finally put this out there. It's amazing how much sense it makes now, but how long it took to have the courage to do this... interesting:

"Someone just like me is out there who wants to know that she/he is not alone in feeling like the outsider…so far outside of the box…a box that you didn’t know existed until one day it hits you like a brick. Actually, no, it doesn’t hit you. No, you run into it...run right into the invisible outside wall of the box.  And you’re like, “What the frick?!” You feel like an idiot for running into something, like tripping on the sidewalk and looking back to see what that heck made you jerk forward so hard while everyone else is laughing. Do you know what I mean?  

I gotta believe there is one person out there in our seven billion or so person world who gets that. Now, mind you, this box wasn’t placed there intentionally to make people miserable and feel excluded. No…I’m convinced it started with good intentions, but we all know where those get you, right? I’m telling you, that’s the one piece of wisdom that never made much sense to me as a kid, but Holy Crap, it certainly does now.  
 
Many a road to our personal Hells has been paved with the ever well-meaning Good Intention. It’s one sneaky, little, seductive force that intention, too, used for eons as the excuse for something that has clearly gone astray from the original intent.  For example, many of our society’s traditions supposedly celebrate love. A noble idea.  I’m all for love. But these traditions developed into really limited acceptable formats…you know…concrete categories of love and ranking of love…like one form of love is somehow greater than another. And it was a slippery slope from there…"