Conversations with a Vampire Hunter (alternate title)
by Stan Faryna
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Elbow, Everthere
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You know what’s hard for me to admit?
That I want to be loved and accepted.
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The problem is that love and acceptance are NOT unconditional. Love and acceptance comes with expectations, obligations and responsibilities.
It’s how it works. This is a law. Just like gravity. Ignore it at your own peril, disappointment and self-defeat.
But don’t get mad at me for pointing out the elephant in the room.
Just like you, I often find the burden of that vector to be difficult, frustrating, exhausting and problematic.
Because I want to be loved and accepted for what makes me happy.
Just like you, I want to be loved and accepted without all that seemingly self-compromising consideration, opinion, and necessity of others.
Just like yours, my own idic legalese, however, contradicts (often) that intimate, inseparable and unavoidable nature of love and responsibility.
This selfish and naive expectation, however, cannot ever overcome the truth that we are here for each other as much as (if not more than) for ourselves.
Because this world is a world of we – not a world of my ways (Sorry Mr. Sinatra!), gimme’s and gotta be me’s.
That’s why it is so frelling hard to admit.
That I do want to be loved and accepted.
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Because we know (without a doubt), that love is inseparable from responsibility and, worse, it is inseparable from the expectations, opinions and necessities of others.
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Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.
Abraham Lincoln
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Stan Faryna
16 September 2012
Bucharest, Romania