Photos

I always run into this problem with photos. I think it's because people only take photos of when they are happy. They are the record of the highlights of life. People rarely take photos of when they are sad or when someone dies or when they are abused. I sometimes look at photos and become jealouse of the subject and their life. But this superficial happiness in my opinion isn't life, at least not on it's own. All the trageties and hardships of my life, coming to terms with my same sex attraction, death of my father, childhood abuse and the hands of a family member, OCD, and now the struggles with my mothers cancer. I think it's these experiences that give my life meaning more than my happy memories. It's these experiences that give me strength not the happy ones. It's these experiences that ground me in ways happy memories can't. If this is true then why don't we photograph these unhappy memories. Maybe it's because we don't need to. We remember the sad memories more than the happy ones, they seem to be more relavent more practical to remember perminently fearing they will happen again. Happy memories I have very few of. Even now I struggle to recall one. Perhaps it's because for me my happy memories aren't big events like sad memories. They are just glimpses, heartedly welcomed and easily forgotten. It's hard to say I wouldn't trade my sad memories for happy ones. That I wouldn't rewrite my life to have my Dad still alive never having cancer, for my Mother to be free of cancer,to never have been abused at 6, to being straight, to never have had panic attacks. It's hard to not want all of these things undone but pulling on these threads is a daunting prospect. What assinine fool would I become? Maybe an even more frightening thought is how much of a better person would I have become. The fear that these sad experiences have stolen from us.

So this is where I sit pondering the alternate lives I could have lived trying to make sense of all the sadness and happiness. Am I happy horrible things have speckeled my life? It's hard to say, but I will not just let them take from me, I will grow from it just in the same way plants need to be pruned to allow them to grow. Horrible things will happen to all of us, we just won't want to take pictures of them.