Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

With your deep leather-like texture and your rich black hue, you’ve always been good at helping me find the answers.

I come to you as I always do, snuggled up to my desk in my cozy studio apartment with a bit of lofi hip-hip playing through my portable bluetooth speaker.

My thoughts have been my only company since the beginning of COVID, with no other guests RSVPed.

Answer me this, where did this money come from? I know I found it in a manilla envelope in a back alley while taking the paths less traveled through beautiful St.Pete, but why?

What if it’s drug money?

What if it’s supposed to pay off someone’s medical debt?

What if it’s lost by a careless millionaire?

What if it’s intentional?

All of those scenarios boil down to two even simpler questions; by having this money, who am I hurting and who would hurt me to get it back?

Someone could be killed from a drug deal gone bad. My intervention of their intentions may have sealed their fate. Because of me, they might r.i.p.

Someone could be under a mountain of medical debt. Now forever buried under the weight of said mountain, they’re among the living dead.

Someone could not even notice that it’s gone. Like a single grain of sand on the beach, when misplaced, not only does it not take away from its beauty, it’s not even missed. Not one bit.

Someone could be watching me right now. That thought alone is scary enough for me.

Hypotheticals, every last one of them. All of those scenarios are just my attempt at trying to justify my actions because regardless of the outcome, I think I’m going to keep it.

I am hurting someone to a varying degree that I may never know. I didn’t earn this money, there was no exchange of goods or services. This is a rare case in which someone has to lose in order for me to gain. Am I sorry?

Not only am I hurting someone, someone would be willing to hurt me. The pain that they’d be willing to inflict upon me would probably correlate to the amount of loss that they’ve incurred.

Knowing just this, would I give it back? Such a simple question, but yet in our complex reality, it depends on all the other answers, or should it? Am I right?

Who am I to judge?

In a perfect world, I’d try to find out where this money was supposed to go and make sure it got there. But I’m a product of this word, and this world isn’t perfect.

I think I’m going to keep it.

What should I do with it?

I could put a down payment on a house. But I already know I won’t do that, because homeownership doesn’t play into the vision that I have for my life. I have big goals, dreams, and aspirations, some of which are the American ones, all of which are my own.

I could finish my ‘73 Chevy C10. It’s been sitting in storage for a good while now, in need of a new engine. I love that truck. I started working on it about three years ago with zero mechanical knowledge of how practically anything on vehicles worked, but now I can do almost everything to it, less painting and body work.

I could start my business. This would arguably be the best use of the money, as a good business will add more value to the community than just the appearances and one-time monetary transactions of purchasing a home or buying a new engine. Give a man a fish, teach him to fish, great businesses teach their employees how to fish in a lake the business knows that everyone will get a good catch. The first step of a good business is to find a good lake. I think I’ve found my lake, now I just need the proper fishing gear.

Of all three choices, I think I’ll finish my truck and then use the rest of the capital to start my business. The idea of homeownership is not my dream, and starting my business will happen in the near future, but it’s just too soon if it were the immediate choice.

Maybe I should just hold onto it for now, not making any large decisions until time has passed. Let the new settle into the normal. Then, I should make a decision from there.

What I’ve found to be true is that sometimes, as long as it’s deliberate, no action can be the best action.

Oftentimes when people find themselves in a big windfall, something about the situation makes them spend as if it’s more than it is. Imagine that you’ve never had more than $500 in your account, yet you come into $20,000, that’s forty times the amount of money that you’ve ever had in your account all at once. Most people, rightfully so, spend it as such.

Before I do the same, I’m going to sleep on it for a few nights.

That’ll give me enough time to find out if someone needs this money more than I do. Maybe I’ll have a change of heart.

If that’s not the case, then it’ll surely give me enough time to make a decision on what I should invest the money into on my own behalf.

Sometimes, we don’t have enough info to make an informed decision, so we must wait.

How long should we wait? It depends.

For the information that we’re missing, we must differentiate between information that we don’t have and information that we can’t have.

Sometimes answers will come with time. Sometimes they won’t come at all. Or even worse, sometimes we run into the truth, one that we were better off not knowing.

Why did my dad not stick around?

Why did my ex cheat on me?

Why does the answer to those two questions matter?

If knowing doesn’t change the future, why worry so much about the past? Presently, I’m at peace. Why pick at scabs? The only place your past is present is in your mind.

If you’re not currently going through anything when you open your eyes, why go through it when you close them?

If you’re currently going through something, or you try and try, but just can’t seem to escape those skeletons, please reach out for professional help.

As a veteran, I’ve seen first-hand that mental health is taken a lot more seriously nowadays.

You don’t have to suffer in silence. There’s a difference between being alone and lonely. You don’t have to be lonely.

Not anymore.

Wounds take time to heal, but they don’t really heal at all if they’re continually reopened.

Even worse is when you’re used to the pain, so much so that it becomes your new normal. Normal and okay aren’t the same. All because it’s normal, doesn’t mean it’s okay.

You deserve to be okay.

I had a mentor once, and her favorite saying was “I am enough”. The trick, she wouldn’t say it, she would get you to say it. And you couldn’t stop saying it until you believed it.

A lot of trauma comes from feeling inferior to whatever arbitrary metric you have in your mind for what your life should be like.

Stop it.

Yes, you can always get more, do more, be more, but at the same time, you are enough.

I’ve heard it once said that closure is a myth. You can give yourself closure anytime you want. You don’t need to know every last detail of what’s on the other side of that door to be able to close it. Close that door. Just close it. Let it go.

Imagine, you wake up with no real recollection of your past memories, but yet you have your knowledge, wisdom, and technical skills that you do now, and you too have come into a small fortune, how would you live your life today?

Do that. I’ll do that too.

At the end of the day, the world will always be varying degrees of darkness, mystery, and suffering, but it’s through these external struggles do we gain internal strength.

We’ve all suffered. We’re all deserving. We’ve all been scratched, broken, or just downright shattered by life at some points in time. But there’s a superpower in being able to pick up this pen, you realize that you’re able to write your own story.

How do you write that story?

How do you live your life?

I don’t know.

I don’t have the answer, nobody does. That particular answer is never found, but created.

You create the life that you want to live. You might not have chosen how this story began, but you do choose how this story ends.

How does your story end?

That’s the thing about asking questions, the answers can leave you with more questions.

So should we not question it, or should we *knock**knock**knock* not answer it?