Every once in a while a coal train will dawdle it’s thicc-ness past my house, making everything that isn’t tied down shake about like Shakira, and it got me thinking about some of life’s biggest rumbles. Overbearingly apparent is what we were force fed from young ages as “ideals”. How we should all aspire to the nuclear family, and to have a spouse and two and a half kids so that everyone can make fun of your armless half-child “Torsolita”, assuring there will always be some form of comic relief. How realm-shattering it can be to love someone with utter and growing certainty, only to be told that through the increase in your passion, they have felt diminishment in their own, or an increase towards someone else. The sense of honour you feel when someone gives you your first fo-shizzle wedding invitation with your name in fine calligraphy. There are so many sides to these BIG events that they form the largest part of their definition separately, to each of us as individuals. It is increasingly uncommon to hear someone say that their “best memory” or “worst trauma” is exactly like someone else’s, because of the vastness of human experience. Each compartmentalized emotion and action become the building blocks of our lives, tempered by what we choose to grow and accept as fact, and what resources we truly use to fruition. Someone who is in an abusive relationship may choose to see the actions of the other party as “regular” or “a phase”, leaving them on a crushingly small island of understanding. Without being informed of the reality of our own worth, the significance of our souls, and the uniqueness of our offerings, we are left to form our own definitions of what it means to be (if there was a better word, I couldn’t think of it) successful.

I personally believe that success is measured by the re-telling of your actions. When people talk about you, do they shower you in praise, or has the path you’ve chosen only allow their tales of you to begin with a bad taste in their mouths and end with others sharing it? Sure, we can all spout bile-coated statements out of emotional vulnerability, and yet those statements almost always say more about ourselves than those we are speaking ill of. We can go out of our way to pick others up or help them when they are at their very worst, and yet those helping hands are what become spoken of in dark corners, not the suffering they tended to. We paint our battles as scenes of bravery in the face of death (as if that depicts courage), and merely take photos of what we have destroyed. No one wastes their time looking for more abrasive information if it is readily available, which perfectly dichotomizes how everyone wants to be remembered for glorified charity. In circumstances where you give genuinely, the admiration and commendation from those you assist is going to outshine any random friend giving you a pat on the back, and if it doesn’t, you probably weren’t doing it for the right reasons.

“I met a woman,

But be prepared to bleed.”