What if fine isn't good enough?

And that, my friends, is what some of us will ask ourselves daily until we choose to ignore our hearts. Or we die. Either choice means the death of something, regardless.

To the late bloomers, my brethren:
The struggle is the reason why we whine; bemoan our precarious and murky positions. It is why we compare ourselves to others, second guess the instincts that we are meant to believe in, and undermine our confidence until it is nothing but a shadow of who we could be. "What is wrong with me? What can I do differently? Why is this/does this/will this keep happening to me? What can I do that has not already been done, and better? Who am I to stand up, stand alone, stand at all when my way is no clearer to me than the next? Will I always fail? Die trying? Leave this earth wanting and wondering and never knowing what I could have done if I did just STAND UP?" The niggling questions are by the thousands, and their multi-faceted, layered answers are responses that we will continually seek...and when we do happen upon any of those answers, we stare in disbelief, and think "no way"...and thus the vicious cycle begins anew.

What I am coming to realize is that the struggle is who we are. What we do, how we live, how we handle the mundane to the unimaginable...it carves us out of the crowd to be what we choose to be. Consciously or not. My writer's block is mightily frustrating, but it will be how I overcome it that lasts as an imprint in this world. The lack of a career that I am proud of makes me restless, jaded and bored until I act out just to entertain myself. The question here is what exact type of fire needs to be lit underneath my feet for me to stand up and start a journey...not just an existence. I long for a family and feel it like a phantom limb...I feel that even though I haven't even got a whiff of "THE one" in my life right now, the man that I want to share my life with and the family that we will create together already exists. Inside of me (alright, in him too, but I still get to name all the kids). My biggest challenge will be to learn how to make that ghost-like limb grow in, real, solid, healthy and strong.

We all know, I can't be growing anything (even a plant) until I am right with myself. And learn how to deal with this struggle. And thus, the vicious cycle...

There are a few things that I know to be true, that I will never doubt.
One of them is that I am not meant to fail.
I will certainly fall. But I am meant to come up swingin' - even if I have to cherish the feeling of the hard earth beneath my cheek for longer than most.