I Am Trying

I am trying, really trying to be kinder. This time of year is slightly liminal for me. There are several weeks this time each year that just feel in flux. I realize a lot of the reasons, but none of them make any real sense to anybody except myself. I have a lot of very good memories of this time of year throughout my life, but they are tempered with as many less-than good memories from the same timeframe.

Most of this lives in my own head, nothing really that is owned by another, just myself. Sadly, I have seen moments when I let the atmosphere inside my head dictate what the outside does or says. Nothing horrible, and genuinely just venting for the most part.Thoughts that turn into verbal vomit. And mostly when I start to do this, I realize what I am going through at that moment and school my tongue. It may be harder to quiet my thoughts, but I attempt to leash my words. There is no other person that needs or deserves to hear my thoughts. 

However, as much I squelch these thoughts, the inside of my head seems to be broadcasting like a pirate radio station. One of the million watt stations from just across the Mexican border. And I have determined that it is an AM radio station because the signal is amplified by the clear skies of late-night airwaves devoid of the interference of the brightness of the sunlit day. 

I wonder if anybody else remembers when AM radio was more prevalent than FM or digital broadcasts, and after dusk the stations would start coming in from the ether. KNBR out of San Francisco, KFI out of Los Angeles, as well as stations out of Washington and Calgary, Alberta. Music, talk radio, and once in a while one would broadcast old radio shows that were popular prior to TV. There were nights I would scan the AM dial looking for and listening to these stations until the encroaching sunrise would degrade the signals to white noise static.

Now, late at night, I spend a lot of time scanning the dial in my head looking for “something else” to listen to. Sometimes I can focus on a story or music that is more pleasing or relaxing. Sometimes it is just static. Sometimes, it is not as pleasant. 

I will get over it.

I am trying to be kinder to others, and I think a lot of that means that I should try to be kinder to my own self. While I am not a terrible person, I freely admit that I can be, and have been, unkind. I care more about being unkind to others than myself. But when I am unkind to others, or remembering when I was unkind, it makes me feel less than charitable to myself. And inside my head it does not matter whether it was something I did or said yesterday or decades ago.

Liminal.

I have, and do try to apologize to others for my actions or words. I will not apologize for others, for I have no control over that. I would hope that I would be afforded that same consideration, but I have learned by my own experiences that there are many others who would either blame me, or at least lay the cost of the actions of others at my feet. I have enough of my own debts to cover to feel the need to pay someone else’s

As far as past events in my head, they live there. I do not know how to purge them from my thoughts. I like the quote: “The past is a place to learn from, not to live in.” Kind of a dust in the wind thing. But the inside of my head gets pretty dusty sometimes. 

I am trying.