In about 45 minutes, I'll be celebrating my one year anniversary of surviving a heart attack. It was last year, Aug 29, that I felt like crap, vomited from the pain and went to the hospital to discover that 1/3 of my heart is dead. My time is probably limited, but now, having lost 21kg, I am way sexier than before. All vaginas open before me and I ask that only those that smell, look weird, are diseased, framed by an ugly human or connected to an ugly soul to move bitch, get out the way.
I am still here, by the grace of God and by the kindness of strangers. Not just the guy who drove me to the emergency room that day or the doctors who administered adequate treatment, but also those who have helped me every step of the way. The ones who gave me a job or jobs, opened amazing doors of opportunity for me to do anything I could ever dream of.
There are those who demand a terrible price of slavery, a fee of my soul, for the favours I have received in my life, and I have cut them off. The less said about them, the better.
Nowadays, there are people - some of them leaders - who also try to spin gratitude into servitude. Their wonky, self-aggrandizing spin machinery telling everyone else to be grateful to them for whatever we rightfully worked for. What we fought for ourselves.
That all our successes are theirs and all our failures - and their own crimes and shortcomings - are our fault. They are the angels of plenty who brought us our food, our clothes, our industry. And all the poison, disease, pollution that come with it are our fault.
And crimes, when done by the select, special few, are not crimes, but charming, Machiavellian quirks. But they are neither Tony Starks nor Robert Downey Jrs. And to the best of official human knowledge, neither Stark nor Downey stole or killed or threatened or abused or lied to any of us.
There were times - not just when I was recovering this past year - but all throughout my short life, that I felt fear. My fears always share two characteristics: they never last very long and they are founded on an irrational, skewed view of the future.
The future is not set in stone. We are, right now, crafting it. All of us. Nobody knows what's going to happen. If we accept it in whatever form it may come, there can be no fear.
The future is the truth. If you are in line with the truth, you will not fear it and you will not be afraid of anything.
I accept the future I am crafting as I live right now, in the present.
