It occurred to me today that we live in a strange, strange world.
Okay well, I've known that for a while, but I hadn't looked at it in this aspect. See, I was reading this horrible cheesy (wonderful, albeit embarrassing to admit that I was reading it) book wherein one of the main characters dies a tragic death, and as I'm sitting there feeling my heart break for this intangible person, I started to wonder - How is it that we can sit here and cry over someone who will never reach full existence, who is merely the thoughts and ideas of a living, breathing human being, and yet we can so easily lack compassion for the very much alive humans whose hearts beat all around us?
I wake up every day to comments on my social media pages calling me tons of things. While some of them are wonderful to see (and though I may not agree with them, I wholeheartedly appreciate the compassion and encouragement I get from all of the loving anonymous strangers out there who follow my... ah... musings), others revel in the idea of perpetually calling me "fat", "slut", "ugly", "disgusting"... the list goes on. I can sit there and block each and every one of those people, but there will always be more who follow in their footsteps. Who actually take JOY in the idea of putting another living, breathing human being down. And no matter what people say, you can sit there and say all day that it doesn't hurt, that it doesn't matter, that their opinion is one negative toss into the wind of hundreds and thousands of positive opinions, but the simple fact that someone would take that moment of their day, as fleeting and unimportant as it may seem to them at the time, to put someone else down for their own selfish joy, THAT is what hurts. That there are real, living people in the world who are going about their own business, doing what makes them happy, and that complete strangers, with all the capability on the planet to love and feel compassion for each other, to cry over a made-up personification of someone who will never live nor die, would love nothing more than to spend those little moments of their (insignificant in the grand scheme of the world, yet ephemeral and delicate to themselves and those who care about them) lives spilling poison into the lives of the equally compassionate, equally alive, equally deserving of love and affection, equally human people around them.
One day, everyone will cease to be. One day, you will die, just as I will. I'd like to think that there should be more to our existence, more to our influence on one another's lives than a little insult we throw at one another, that our paths should cross amongst each other in better ways than "I was that guy who called her a slut on Facebook one time", or "I was the girl who told her she was ugly, when all she ever wanted was to feel beautiful". Because one day, you will feel down, lonely, or utterly hopeless... every last one of us is destined to feel pain along our journeys in life, and in that moment of pain, all you could ever ask for is relief. All you could ever strive for in life is to love, to be loved, and to not feel the inevitable pain that reminds us we are alive. We are tangible. We are beyond any significance of words on a page or a screen or uttered through the mouth of another. But in that moment of pain, imagine all the people in life that you hurt along the way, culminated in that one instance where you, yourself are hurting, and imagine how much greater life could have been if instead of constantly dealing with pain, instead of constantly inflicting it upon each other, if we held each other in times of need. If we picked a stranger up off the sidewalk and told them "you are beautiful. You are deserving of love and affection. You are human, and nothing in life should ever matter as much as this very acknowledgement that no matter what choices you make, no matter where you go, no matter what you ultimately end up doing in this world, I respect you." Just imagine what a world this could be, if only we knew how to let it.
