as vaguea as he is flawed

Failed Poet said,

"I stopped taking my meds because I didn't like the way they made me feel.  I walked around like a zombie, totally numb.  What's the point?  I'd rather be able to feel something, even if it's anger and despair and irritation and sadness.  I'm a poet; I need to be able to experience the entire range of my emotions; that's like taking away an artist's paint and asking him to dip his brush into a pail of dishwater.  How do you paint a sunset using dishwater?  How do you write a poem if you can't feel anything?  I slipped right into that role, too, so easily.  The socially awkward, misunderstood, self-conscious drunken loner.  And it fit so snugly against my skin.  That's the way they all were, I told myself, so I was like that.  You can convince yourself of almost anything if you're willing to sacrifice certain aspects of yourself.  It was a trap; I realize that now.  But when you're twenty-one, what do you know about traps? Twenty-odd years later, the chickens have come home to roost."

Encouraging Soul said,

"What matters is, did you do your best?  Do these poems embody your integrity and represent who you really are?"

Failed Poet said,

"They're just a lot of chatter that has nothing to do with reality."

Encouraging Soul said,

"I carry around this quote I read recently about people who rather bitterly realize that they can't change the world and that righteousness and idealism have their limits.  ' By the end of his life, a new man emerges, no longer interested in changing the universe but devoted to enriching his corner of the world.'  It's helped me, anyway.  I struggle every day of my life with anger and ask god to work it out for me.  I used to tell people, 'I'm just keepin' it real. If you dislike it, I have no time for you, so bump you.'  I wasn't angry at them.  I was angry at myself.  Mostly at the choices I'd made.  For internalizing all those childhood labels and stereotypes.  For being a people-pleaser.  Being afraid to say no to family members.  Submitting to men I had no business submitting to.  Allowing them to make decisions for me, knowing full well they didn't have the intellectual capacity to make those decisions, I didn't trust my instincts, even though they were right.  So I know all about chickens coming home to roost."

Failed Poet said,

"And a cliché becomes a cliché because, more often than not, they're true."

Encouraging Soul nodded as Failed Poet returned to the biggest myth in the history of myths.

The myth is that you crawl off the field if you get hurt.

And somebody will come get you if you can't crawl off the field.