I’m Just Like You

I’m screwed up, just like anyone.  I’m not perfect by any means and I face this concept daily, again, like any one of you.  I feel misunderstood, I feel confused, I feel happy, and these are all very normal things – even if I’m not a very normal person.  Heck, I’m the only person I know who wears suspenders.  Well, okay… there’s one other.  One of the annoyances is that I also have a horrible combination of my parents in me.  My dad lets his emotions fly off the handle constantly, and my mom bottles everything up.  So I have the wonderful blessing of being the most passionate fella I’ve ever come across, yet I naturally bottle up most of that emotion.  By this point, this bottling of a strong and natural emotion has created quite a mess inside.  I want what anyone wants, though… love and happiness.  Especially love .  I’m more deficient in that than anything, that much I know.  It’s hard because I’ve been hurt many, many times in my 27 years.  By family, friends, strangers… whoever.  I was the sweetest most sensitive little boy you’ll ever meet, but a childhood and adolescence of pain buried those feelings to a place where even I can’t seem to access them anymore.  That’s part of why I’ll love a great movie so much.  Sometimes I’m able to tap into the good parts of that buried emotion, and it feels good because I so rarely do.  It’s a relief.  I have one of the biggest hearts in the world, and I’m so full of love when I’m able to hit that chord I can’t help but dance along the sidewalk grinning from ear to ear.  However, when you bury emotion, you bury everything in one giant pile.  So, like I said… it’s a mess, and I’m just trying to figure it all out.  That’s why you can find blog entries on my site that almost seem to contradict each other.  Sure, sometimes I write something that’s just hilarious, but the more personal entries are just as much me attempting to understand myself as they are for you.  I’ve been doing this for a long time, trying to figure things out, but I still don’t always get it right.  Sometimes I’m misunderstood as being cold, or spiteful, or anything else, and I have this amazing ability to be able to frustrate people beyond capacity at times, so things don’t always go well – which obviously doesn’t do me any good, either.  Although it’s nothing new, over the past week or so I’ve been going a little deeper than usual, trying to really get at a few things inside… and I rustled up the sediment in there. Obviously I maintain just fine, it’s rare most of you will see any real change, because like I said… I hide it.  There’s a shell, layers and layers of protection – some I have control over, most I do not.  I hide it until I’m sitting my room at 1:30 in the morning, watching/listening to something beautiful on YouTube, and the shell cracks.  At that point all frustrations, anger, whatever else all collapses away, and I cry.  Like a little girl I bawl my eyes out, and in that moment I feel that sweet little sensitive boy inside getting to peek out and say hi.  All he wants is love – both to give and to receive.  To borrow a line from the movie Beautiful Girls, "I just want something beautiful."  I’ll admit, I become a big sap at that moment… all I want to do is hug anyone who needs it, because to me a hug is the most valuable thing in the world.  And when it’s done right, there’s nothing like it – trust me, I know the best hugger in the world .  So that little boy comes out, smiles at me and says hi before retreating back deep inside.  This time, though, he felt like saying a little something… so I decided to write this blog.  The purpose?  I don’t know… he’s already started returning to his hiding place.  I guess I just wanted to say something nice.  I won’t get into the specifics of what I was necessarily thinking about when the shell burst, because this is for all of us.  We all go through crap.  We’re all trying to better ourselves, find happiness, and make our way in this world.  We’re all in this crazy, beautiful mess together, my friends, and none of us are close to perfect.

Like I said… I’m just like any of you who are reading this right now, and you’re just like me, and we’re just like everyone else.  Sure, we’re probably very different (there IS only one Mark Mushakian, after all, and there’s only one of you), but we’re all human – and that’s all I need to know.  And all you need is love .