Dues — Have You Paid Yours

Today I was thinking about how I’ve paid my dues. At 50 I finally feel like yep, I’ve paid them. I know what I’m talking about now. I’m qualified to answer that, I’ve been in the trenches — reading and learning, writing and learning, catching buses and learning, working for others and learning, studying and learning.

When you begin to learn, you finally realise how little you actually know, how little as a race we humans actually know and how much there is still to learn.

When you can walk into a room full of professors and tell them they’re wrong and show them why and they agree — you’ve paid your dues.

I still feel though that a debt collector is going to pop up from somewhere and say, uh excuse me, you forgot about this bill right here.

Regardless of this, my quest is coming to a close now. I’m a paid up member of life until proven otherwise and because I now feel that way, the writing is pouring out of me.

Rightly or wrongly, I felt like I didn’t know enough, understand enough, hadn’t learned enough things about the world and what people are doing in it. I felt inadequate. Life has taken me the long way around. Instead of using that as an excuse as to why I haven’t done anything ‘great’ yet I am now embracing it as a very long and detailed education.

The fear of losing things stopped me from being authentic. Now I understand I may lose them anyway being myself or being what I thought I had to be.

I am a solitary human being. I don’t like being around people much. They hurt me — a lot. You can crush me with a look, a comment, an opinion — I’m really sensitive. I accept this now. I don’t have to fix it. I understand why I am this way. It does not mean I am not strong. I am stronger than most everyone I have ever met.

I get myself now. I’m all paid up. I come from a place of deep knowledge and understanding, confidence and fragility. Either way, the time is now to walk into, or back to, what I started doing when I was 11 and felt that I didn’t know enough to keep doing. I’ve paid my dues. Have written something every day for all those years, and now, I’m going to start really doing it because I’m qualified. I feel qualified to comment. I finally feel qualified to write those stories and put them out there to be read.

This is really going to hurt. But I have nothing else.