When did the Shades of Gray Overcome the Blacks and Whites?

When did the shades of gray overcome the blacks and whites?

Things seemed much more urgent when I was younger… The yearning for love, much more painful… The emotion itself, much more overwhelming and intense… Words like “love” and “hate” came as easily as “like” does these days… There was none of this politically correct junk of trying to understand different perspectives and tolerate views completely opposed to my own… There was no in between… The answers to questions were rarely anything but “Yes” or “No”… The word “maybe”, which has dominated my language over the years, barely existed in my vocabulary back then. I either wanted something or didn’t… and the possibility of that changing was non-existent as far as I was concerned.

However, the years have taught me to second-guess my decisions and my desires… It’s no longer as easy to say “yes” or “no” to anything for that matter… “Maybe” seems to come much more easily as does “we’ll see”… As a result, passion in my life has mostly become stunted. I no longer yearn for things with all my heart because my heart is unsure and keeps getting second-guessed every step of the way even when she thinks she’s sure….

At first I saw this gradual change as a blessing. I was growing up and learning to tolerate all kinds of different views. My opposition to things I didn’t approve of grew weaker and weaker. I was beginning to accept things I couldn’t change and attempting to go with the flow; or so I thought. What I neglected to realize was that along with that strong opposition, I was also losing my passion for the things I approved of. It seems, when hate turns into mild disapproval, you also begin to lose the passion that fuels desire and love… So when there’s less hate, and less intensity… there’s also less passion, less heat, less love.

Somewhere along the way it seems I lost my passion and intensity… I lost my anger, my desires, my hunger… All for the sake of growing up and becoming more politically correct, more appropriate….

Sometimes I look back at poems and stories I wrote in high school. They’re so full of intensity it sounds like I was almost drowning in my emotions… I can literally feel the heartbreak in the sad ones and the happy ones are so full of hope and optimism that today, they make me gag. The urgency of all those emotions I was feeling is felt in every syllable. Whereas these days, I’m lucky if anything makes me feel strongly enough for words to just pour out of me without thinking. Those days however, all it took was one look or a single harsh word from the right guy! Those days I was dying without “his love”… these days I even question the existence of the emotion in question. Those days just talking to “him” meant smiling for the rest of the day, whereas today no one has that kind of power over me… In fact no one has had that powerful an effect on me for over 7 years now.

I never knew what people meant when they said that life and time wears you down… At least not until I stopped to think about this change I had gone through. But now I think I get it. I think what they mean by it is that with time, things that were once crystal clear to you become murky… your blacks and whites rub off on each other and one day you wake up and realize nothing in your life is black or white anymore. You’re trapped in a purgatory of your own making, trying to sort through all these new and gloomy shades of gray.