Written Unconditionally

People have asked how it is I could pick my self up again and again to face each day in times of adversity. I answer that I never give up on the belief that today I might find the answer. I am the resilient child. I am the one who never stops trying to get it right. I’m one of those blow up clowns. You knock me down and I bounce up—usually with a smile.

I never learned to leave a bad situation, until a better one presented itself. I never learned to say no, because forgiveness came so easily. I always made that extra room, because I knew I could get over being cramped. If someone’s luggage got lost, I prayed that it was mine. I knew that I would handle it best. I didn’t want the pain of watching someone else in distress, when I knew I could just switch into adventure mode.

So many people carry burdens of bad events for so long. The damage that they do themselves by being angry over things is confusing to me, especially when I see it in people otherwise so smart. Why do they think to hurt others will make themselves not hurt? Why don’t they know it only makes the hurting larger and more pronounced? It takes so much less energy to let people in and close to me. Yet they work so hard to keep people away and push them out.

I’ve been thinking about where my resiliency, my open heart, my faith in stars and people springs from. Two words keep answering each time the question comes—unconditional love. I am the child of a father who loved me exactly as I am. He delighted and took pride in me and wondered in my wondering. He did not indulge me. He gave to me the best he had to offer—his stories, his songs, his barrel chest to lean upon when I was lost.

And because he expected nothing in return, everything was his, and I see him in some way in everyone I meet.

I am the child of a resilient father, no question that is also true. But it is his unconditional wish for my happiness, at his expense, if that was the cost, that made me resilient, loving, and ever ready to try to get it right just one more time—for me and for him.

How could I not forgive those who’ve not experienced love unconditional? How could I not have compassion for their fault, even when they throw things at me? Their world, their thoughts, their memories are tied up in knots so small. Why should they understand or believe my motivations, if they’ve no experience with such thing? To them, I must seem to be a giant fairy tale, a smooth operator, a manipulator looking for their weakness.

Love given conditionally is not love to me.

Yet to talk of such things to people who have never known it is like trying to describe the exact shade of a color. You can only show them and hope that one day they will open their hearts enough to see. I have no choice but to try.

It's written unconditionally above my father's name, right there upon my heart.

—me strauss Letting me be