living a fulfilling creative life requires many things. a great love, comes to mind. a burning passion for understanding. a dire unfulfilled spiritual need. a secret drug habit. an unrecovered memory of tragic abuse. or even something small, like a sound or a smell or an image you just can't get out of your mind. regardless of what you need, creativity is your life force and if you close it off, you suffocate everything within you that is truthful.

as i listen to the people around me, i am afraid of what they are communicating because sometimes i hear too much. so i distance myself, and say things that dictate the conversation in a distracting way. but sometimes i wonder what i would hear if i just listened, and wasn't so afraid of hearing too much of the inner echoes of the people around me.

i heard a story today about a girl with low self-esteem who gives her body away in hopes that one day, someone will love her. i am convinced that she doesn't know what love is. and the people who see this weakness in her are compelled to behave in the most cruel fashion possible, as if to punish her for her lack of awareness. i wonder what it is that she represents that terrifies and angers these people so much. maybe we hate weakness and desperation in others because we secretly loathe it in ourselves.

when i think about it, when a person goes through some pretty dark experiences in life, no matter how radiant their personality, the projection never changes the fact that their inner core is still a deeply guarded secret. and from the discipline of having to maintain and protect this secret, a person gains an aura of intensity.

does being around each other make us each more afraid of commitment? i think so.