a firetender's chronical.6

I've been scraping around this life in the firm belief that whatever I was creating at the time was "the shit!" and it would only be a matter of days before the world would recognize how cool it, and I was, and open up its stores of riches to me.

I am a Hope Fiend. This has sustained me through years of trial and error in an incredibly diverse life. I've always known somehow, sometime soon, someone would recognize me and the work I'm doing as valuable. Any minute now!

The payoff has never been about money. It's been about being seen for who I am, appreciated for it, and being acknowledged for my unique contribution to life. In a nutshell, it's about my need to be loved.

It's an infantile thing that stems back to the fact that in my family structure/dysfunction, I was the Invisible Child who became the Black Sheep of the family. So for all practical purposes, reliance on hope amidst invisibility has been my hallmark for 55 years.

It's not been all that bad a combo, actually. I've been under everybody's radar and free to explore wherever I want and risk whatever I have without the fear of losing anything but my life.

One compounding factor has been, due to feeling unsupported in anything I did; I rejected the dominant values around me and insisted on finding my own way to do everything. So even those people who could see me, didn't get it!

My Acting and Stand-up Comedy Teachers each ended up saying they didn't know how to work with me anymore because they couldn't figure out what I was doing. To their credit, they each gave me a stage to work through my process. As you know, I am both a World Famous Actor and Comic today because of this!

Kidding aside, what has happened is everything I learned through them and everything else I've learned but never got acknowledged for turned into tools I can use for healing. I didn't know that at the time because I thought I was going to be an Actor, or a Comic, or a Whatever.

Wrestling with invisibility I've had to try all sorts of stuff. I've had to pick up things that others have discarded and learn how to use them in novel ways in the hopes that "That one" would be the one that makes the grade.

None of them, individually in their specific fields, did. I'm talking of 55 years worth of creations big and small, none of them struck a chord with enough people so that I became distinguished in any one phase of my life.

Strangely enough, I am neither complaining nor lamenting. In fact, I'm braying about how, in the last couple years I've realized what it's all been for. Not only that, but I'm telling you that with the tools I have gathered in my lifetime, I don't have to do one more thing, create one more approach, take one more picture or write one more word and I'll be perfectly content to live out my life exactly as it unfolds, moment to moment, using what I have.

After so many years of trying to distinguish myself as something, I've quit fighting and decided to just stand here and be me.

I'm exclaiming that my trip has been fascinating and when I look back, I have never wanted for anything for very long. As long as I kept finding ways to contribute, whatever I've needed has been there. That includes love, but only because I've learned that love looks the way love looks, not the way I want it to look.

I am living the manifestation I envision. Here I am doing nothing more than what I usually do which is all about communicating, but I'm creating a world that has a place for me in it as I do so.

Zaadz? I don't know where the hell that came from, but it appeared just at the time when I needed it. Had I become aware of it one year ago, I would not have been ready to use it.