ab initio, ad infinitum

deserve.

DEATH IS ME. me is death. enjoy the chapter. nihilism. do good, be well. <3

D E S E R V E .

An earth-shattering revelation I have made; when it comes down to it, it's not about deserving. Some people will never think themselves as worth enough, as much as it makes my heart break.

Because it comes down to the fact that everyone deserves goodness. It's inherent; the same as our DNA and genetic makeup.

Everyone deserves joy, everyone deserves kindness, everyone deserves respect. Everyone. Every single damn person on this earth, holy or damned, deserves good things, because we are just people. We are just bone and blood and sinew and we deserve goodness, and we need to give that goodness to each other.

Every person deserves to feel the soft joy of waking up in the morning, every person deserves to share a bright laugh with a loved one. Every person deserves to dance around in their kitchen not caring what others think, every person deserves a mixtape of sunshine songs with their name written on it, scrawled in Sharpie on painter's tape. Every person deserves to love and be loved, whether that be romantic or platonic or familial or undefined. People deserve good.

People deserve smiles, people deserve lovingly crafted handwritten letters, people deserve warm hugs. People deserve to chase their dreams and to fall and to have a hand help them up when they do, a hand that bandages their bloody ones with feather-light gentleness.

People deserve soft, people deserve peace, people deserve all the good things that come to them. People deserve the feeling of pure and utter joy when the sun shines on them - for them.

Another earth-shattering revelation I have made: I'm a person too.

It takes that moment, for that fact to properly set in, when the domino effect occurs. When it hits me, that I deserve good. Me. I do.

It's not something new to me, I've always known this. But when you become the judge the jury the executioner in your head, laying out facts and analyzing with cool precision that you only seem to apply to yourself, contrary to the warmth you feel for everyone else, you truly see it.

If I can honestly, earnestly say I believe every person deserves kindness, what excuse do I have to exempt myself from that every person? I am a person. I'm very conscious of my humanness, of my mistakes, of my faults and guilt. But when I automatically seek out the brightness and the redeemable and the heroic in others, why do I exclude myself?

I'm not gonna pretend that it's a one-way, ruler-straight street from there; it's not. The path to forgiveness can be winding and strewn with boulders hard to move by oneself, as I know this one is. I'm not sure if I'll get there anytime soon. I know that. But to be aware, to gently remind myself that maybe I can deserve good too, is progress.

Progress is good. And I deserve good.

When it comes down to it, it's not really about deserve. It's not about whether I have earned the right to happiness or to feel good or to feel proud. Because who's going to give me that permission, that approval? – Me? You? Society? And would I accept it anyway?

Earth-shattering revelation: it's a contradicting thing, to deserve. Yet somehow, that gives it almost all of it's meaning. Because while it's not about deserving, it exactly is.

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