Words Matter - Letter to My Mom

Grandpa (her father) was an artist and calligraphist

RECOGNITION seeking behavior is not the same as ATTENTION seeking behavior.

I CHOOSE to LIVE loudly, but the world only heard and saw what it was ready to until now.

Until they MISSED me. Until I felt gone. Until the world thought I'd checked out.

What matters is what you MAKE matter.

I matter. It's nice to know.

WORDS matter.

While you spent your life LOOKING at them blankly, escaping into them to appear CONNECTED, while you acted as if the words on the page mattered more than the world existing around you, I spent my life LISTENING to what you could not hear.

LOOKING at life in a way you never could.

I saw LIFE happening. I saw life flowing.

I saw MY energy matter. I FELT connected.

Life IS connecting.

Life IS what you make it.

Life is connecting with who and what MATTERS.

What matters, you ask? What you DECIDE matters.

WHO you decide matters.

HOW they matter can be a challenge to discern.

How much is the connection worth to YOU?

How bad do you want it?

What's more important to you in each moment is up to YOU to decide.

Where it goes from here depends on YOUR self-perception.

Do you feel lucky? Do you feel worthy?

Life answers the questions we ask of it energetically.

Which do you want to know more about?

How much worse it could get or how much better?

You told me, "Hurry up. I can't listen that slow."

For a very long time, I heard that as:

What you have to say isn't important enough for me to stay focused long enough to hear it.

I heard it as:

You're taking too long. You're far too much trouble.

I wanted to EXIST in your world.

I don't hear it that way anymore.

Your energy is yours.

Mine is mine.

And I don't have to hurry through myself anymore.

I matter.

Maybe that's why I've spent so much of my life wanting to be "discovered."

I didn't know what I wanted to be discovered for.

I just knew I wanted someone to SEE me.

A friend recently told me I'll have to learn to speak up for myself.

Judgment feared is judgment felt.

I feared being judged on what I had to say.

I feared whether what I said mattered.

I feared nobody was listening.

I faced those fears by recognizing MY journey and noticing that I was the source.

The source of anything is the source of everything.

Just like how you do anything is how you do everything.

You don't know what you don't know, so how can you claim anything to be impossible?

I did what you told me.

"Read a book, write a book, go do something productive."

So I did.

Here I am.

Here we are.

Are we there yet?

Do you love me yet?

I don't need the answer anymore.

Whether you love me does not matter to me anymore.

Because I KNOW I am loved and I matter.

Because I exist, the world is made better.

I did my part. So did you.

Whether you see it, believe it, or not.

I SEE you.

Now, I KNOW you.

I UNDERSTAND you.

That's what LOVE is to me.

I love you.

You don't have to love me, but I understand you.

And thanks to you, I understand not only MY life, but how LIFE flows.

While you escape INTO words, I used words TO escape.

I played the roles. I played the games.

I've played both sides.

I've been the bad guy and the good guy.

Depending on who's telling the story.

When I was the one talking, usually I played the bad guy.

Everything felt like it was MINE to own, except my opinions and my voice.

Nobody wanted to hear it. They still don't sometimes.

And that's okay.

Most people love me from afar because I was a whole lot to handle.

I've come to terms with that, too.

People matter to me.

LIFE matters to me.

Love and growth matter to me.

Not everyone likes me, but they'll remember me.

I challenge. That's what I do.

I inspire growth through conversation.

People trust me with their excitement and curiosity

People ask me for MY perspective.

Whether we dream together or argue together, we walk away knowing more than we did before.

We connect with each other.

We connect with the moment.

I wish you could feel that.

I tried to offer that to you.

You resisted. Still do.

But now, I understand.

I don't take it personally anymore.

And this is where I started seeing your life differently.

The life YOU chose.

The life Dad built for you.

The life that happened FOR you.

It is now the life you "suffer" through, wishing and awaiting the end.

To say that would make most people sad.

But I see your pain.

You've spent your whole life being who you thought the world wanted you to be because, as you said, "What were you supposed to do with 3 kids?"

In his life, Dad was an asshole.

Yes, I said it. You know you've thought it.

Everyone has said it but you, that I know of.

With him being who he was and you being who you are, we, your children, turned out according to how much we let you and him affect us.

Like me, Dad was a dreamer.

You told me you were waiting for Mr. Right.

Then you got tired of waiting. You were DONE waiting.

You had made Aliyah. That's why he showed up for you.

Because you had finally selected a path for yourself.

Life tempted you with what you had always wanted.

How long did it take before you realized:

Be careful what you wish for.

Dad wanted me to be who HE wanted me to be.

Turns out, I'm exactly that.

Since he's been gone, you'll think this is crazy, but he's become my best friend.

His purpose in your life was to be your hero.

And I think you feel like you served a purpose in his.

You gave him the kids and the family he wanted.

You gave the best 30+ years of your life.

He abandoned you. He left you alone.

He left you in the care of the kids you didn't even want.

Responsibilities become heavy.

They become BURDENS when they don't, or no longer, resonate.

We escape or control. Dad controlled. You escaped.

When does the world notice the sacrifices YOU made to bring happiness into the lives of others?

Maybe that is something you and I have more in common than either of us realized.

We tried to connect over ceramics. That was fun.

Latch hook. Some shows.

What else was there?

Did any of that matter? It did to me.

Whether it did to you or not matters not.

What matters to me is:

I matter.

I now have the husband you kept trying to tell me to find.

The one you wish you had found, I'm sure.

He would give me the world if he had it to give me.

I think Dad tried. He wanted to.

He gave you HIS world.

The problem is, he never asked about yours.

I live my journey. He lives his.

Our marriage is about traveling each of our respective journeys together.

Supporting each other.

Not CONTROLLING or "COPING WITH" (a/k/a tolerating, but these are HER words) each other.

He loves me for me. I love him for him.

We've had our challenges and I'm sure we'll have more, but we face them TOGETHER.

He said he didn't want to stand in my way. Just be my home base.

He's exactly that.

No matter where I am, I KNOW that he loves me.

His world is better because I'm in it.

But the world doesn't know yet.

He's still finding his voice, but we're figuring it out.

You taught me terms like, "Good enough."

For most of my life, I resented that.

I saw it as settling.

But it became permission to not be perfect.

Permission to be exactly where I belong.

He became for me everything that I wanted.

I became for me everything that I wanted.

The only thing he protects more than me is his time.

So I made "good use" of MY time to lead by example.

You and Dad taught me to use what I have.

With money being limited, and energy being compromised, TIME is all I had to work with.

I assessed what I know about the law of attraction and applied what I know to my own life.

Dad said, "Friends come and go. Family is forever."

As if anything is owed because the bloodline is shared.

I disagree. Nothing is owed to anyone.

For a long time, I thought you owed me your love just because you are my mother.

On the other side of that coin is the guilt I felt for leaving.

And the gratitude I felt when my brother took over, when I got tired of TRYING so hard.

When I ran away to find ME.

Ironically, it all made sense when I came back and saw you, my kids, my brother, my niece, and then came back to my husband.

I am not the person that people knew when I left.

I'm not even sure how or when it happened.

Maybe that isn't the point.

Maybe the point is that I finally stopped waiting for someone else to tell me who I was.

What you sought by taking in words, without considering the words you were using, I found by putting words together.

By USING words.

Words became my way out.

Then they became my way in.

I've used them to understand my life.

I've used them to challenge myself.

I've used them to connect. I've commanded respect.

I've inspired. I've helped people grow.

I've learned to share my own journey, including the times when I was being an "asshole."

When I was dismissive. When I took people for granted.

When fear, doubt or insecurity made me behave in ways I wouldn't choose from a place of confidence.

I don't need someone to look bad for me to look good.

If I have to make someone else smaller for me to feel bigger, how good am I really?

And if I'm talking as if I have something to prove, who am I trying to prove it to?

Them? Or myself?

Energy is fluid. It ebbs and it flows.

We attract it or resist it.

Embrace it or tolerate it.

We breathe IN life as we appreciate or anticipate.

We breathe OUT and let go of life we have already lived and breathed.

We connect with ourselves to FEEL the moment.

We TRUST the moment to work out FOR us.

Whether you are or not, I'm proud of myself.

Not only do I know and trust me, but I trust the moment.

And I know people.

Remember when I showed you my first office and you said, "Must be nice to have a place to go every day."

It was. It still is.

I'm impervious to your sarcasm, criticisms and hurtful words anymore.

The words you choose can't hurt me anymore.

One time, to hurt me, someone accused me of being just like you.

You read. I write.

You suffer. I appreciate.

You tolerate. I embrace and empower.

We are NOT the same.

And yet, I understand you.

I love you.

I tolerate the words and dismissiveness because now, I understand it.

And with you, being my mom, had it not been for you.

I would not be HERE today.

But more importantly, today, I love and respect ME.

What I always WISHED for you.

You told me to do something constructive.

So I did.

Long overdue, as I see it, but I wrote a letter.

You may not like what it says.

You may not believe it.

You may never see me the way I see myself now.

And that's okay.

Because for the first time in my life, I don't need you to.

I see ME.

I know ME.

I matter.

And what I say matters. Whether anyone is LISTENING to it but me.

Always with love, - Yael