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My words are so vain and empty. So cracked and damaged, with the feel of having said them a million times that it has never mattered. On the one hand, I understand what Beth means when she talks about writing for an audience (and Beth is awesome, by the way. I read her stuff religiously.), but it's hard for me. It's not that I don't want to try my hardest when I write stuff online, but I guess it's just more that I like to think that I write mostly for myself, as a sort of respite. I don't do much in the way of writing on honest-to-goodness paper anymore, unless it's to jot down passing thoughts to meditate on later, so online writing is my only outlet. I don't like turning it into something where I have to follow a lot of rules. Now, see, the previous sentence there sounds so stupid, because I love English and it's grammar and syntax and rules and the way I can twist them and use the rules to change the way people should read what I write. I love having constraints in that manner, but I hate having constraints in what I write. I just pretend, mostly, that there's nobody out there reading this, because if I do that, everything comes out all the more smoothly and candidly. The second I think upon the fact that I'm being watched, the ancient fear of rejection and shame/ridicule creeps in until I'm censoring myself the way I sometimes feel I have to in my church or around certain people. I always have this insistent pride in the fact that I was a shy kid and I somewhat got myself out of that stage (of course, with God's grace), and so the thought of self-censorship in a manner that is so self-destructive and unnecessary makes me shudder and shake. Yet I know I do it. Yet it's wrong. I say to myself a million times a day - "If only people just acted like themselves, just were people, then everyone would know that everyone else is human just like them and there would be no class and no discrimination." I mean, I'm thinking of this in the setting of the church. Why do people put up these fronts, these ridiculously perfect cardboard images of themselves that their true selves lurk behind, spectre-like? I don't mean only in regards to their sins or their dirtiness - we're all sinners and there is no doubt of this. But we all shelter ourselves from one another, afraid to experience a reaction or step out. I criticise this all in almost everyone I see and am constantly amazed by the fact that it seems almost everyone in the world seems to be guilty. Then I listen to myself speak and realize that I have no greater witness for myself than anyone else. I'm guilty as well.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story called "Emotional Bankruptcy," wherein the young girl, only seventeen or so, had half-loved and given and taken and needed so much and so early that when her true love came and she knew it, she had nothing left to give. As he left after kissing her, she cried bitter tears for having given up all her love on so many unworthy causes when she needed only to save it for the one worthy. We are all giving pieces of ourselves to the silliest places while in the most precious of situations, we are holding ourselves back from those who may truly need to only once experience something real from us by seeing us be true to ourselves and honest before Christ and His church. He has given Himself for her, how can we refuse this sacrifice?