Sprawling Unique

I spent a lot of time in the past apologising for various aspects of myself, but no more so than my emotional side. It's funny, we have to accept who we are and yet on a regular basis you get advice; be it people suggesting you were too forward about something, too shy - maybe as with me they try to level the criticism that like you wear your heart on your sleeve.

In all honesty I do; and actually, I've come to that point in my life where I'm happy to stand up and be counted. Alex Burke does wear his heart on his sleeve. Most people who even remotely know me can usually get at the least a general sense of where I am from, for want of a better term, my outwardness.

A couple of things strike me about this though. First, to assume that you know what's going on with someone because they are for example a little more quiet is so overly simplistic - a person could put on being fine when they're really being eaten up on the inside. The second thing is how we feel changes moment to moment, we never feel exactly the same.

I don't think there is some kind of attitudinal norm, and probably even more so it's thats we all find different things a norm and want to be surrounded by different things. It's likely even that our own idea of norm changes moment to moment.

So with that said I am ok with saying that I feel strongly about things. Nobody is perfect and I'm sure on more than the odd occasion things like work have gotten to me more then they would others - but as long as we can keep those things in mind, keep perspective on our flaws and our traits we can just be ourselves. Perhaps that's all we can do; I attempt to do this while trying hard not to make those who are around me unhappy.

Where this really matters is when someone you care for levels a criticism at you, a reason not to invest time in to seeing the person behind the experiential mask. The truth is we don't really know people, especially not when you're gonna spend that level of time with them. As I got older I realised with these things you're always taking a risk in some way - we fancy someone, yes, but whether it really works or not maybe we can't know until we try.

At the end of the day as a human being I think we want to be around people who are prepared to commit the same of themselves as you yourself do. If we meet someone who doesn't want to try I think we need the courage to believe in more in-spite, despite times of reality's emotional bite. Some people get attached, some don't; our uniqueness sprawls on.