Sometimes the struggle is real. You know how it is when you’re supremely pissed or hurt and you have the absolute right to kick ass and take names and then some chirpy-ass ray of sunshine tries to uplift you by meme, or cliche and you have a sudden desire to take them out at the knees?

This is me vs. me some days.

Although I’ve developed a powerful ability to choose what I focus on, there are mornings when I wake up from nightmares hauling in memories that make me want to spew. My heart starts burning with that righteous fire you get when you’re ready to level things down to the foundation of it all, and for a moment or two I damn the consequences of what it would do to who I am. It trembles inside me knowing I have the power to do so.

Then the rest of me wakes up.

Sometimes what I’m feeling is so huge that the only thing I can think of to be grateful for to divert myself in that instant, is so trivial and immediate that it’s like fighting a forest fire with a water pistol. So I have to lie there with my heart blistering while my mind pours out gratitude one thimble-full at a time.

I don’t care for those mornings.

Then, after I’ve come back to my reality and remember where and who I am now, some hapless soul mistakes me for a Pollyanna who is too clueless to see the ugly in the world and that must be why I’m happy. I’m obviously unrealistic in my view of the world and can’t see the ugly. I don’t know the trials and tribulations that are to come. I’m naive and unsuspecting of what people are capable of doing. Maybe I’m just too blind to see what’s right in front of me.

The look on my face ended that conversation abruptly.

I see it with great clarity. I’ve lived what I allowed. I won’t do it again, and I refuse to give it any more of my time. My mistakes will be new ones to carry me forward. I’ll let someone else caterwaul about what’s done.

I’ve got better things to do.

So forgive me, (or not) for my belief in better things, my hope for the future and my ability to decide who I will be and what kind of life I live. I will continue to pummel the righteousness right out of myself until these moments are few and far between.

I’m beginning to really like that about myself.