This is me taking the high road.

This is me being the bigger person.

At 5 AM this morning, these are the thoughts that are running through my head. After spending the day catching up on much needed sleep, destressing after the events of the past days and weeks and months, finally ending up at the bar and feeling very much at home, one small email kicked my brain back into high gear. So I crawled into bed at 2 AM, read a few chapters of the current book (Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor, which I’m hoping will be like Choke and sucker-punch me with greatness and inspiration in the last fifteen pages), and turned out the light by 2:30, an astonishingly early goodnight for me.

Or so I thought, because it was around 3 AM when I realized that I was not asleep, nor would I be anytime soon.

This is me being accepting.

This is me watching the universe unfold as it should.

This is me not really knowing what to say in reply.

Because, honestly, the more I think about everything that has transpired in the course of the past week or ten days, I’m just ready to put all this behind me. There’s a certain fog of absolute insanity that coats all of this in its fine, ashy mist, and feeling that approach just makes me weary.

There are three sides to every story, you know: yours, mine, and the truth. As I read that email last night, I was reminded again of what sorts of distance can separate the three.

People believe what they want to believe; sadly, people are often encouraged to believe distortions and illusions by those around them, for whatever reasons. Rarely do people stop and try to see how the same story appears from a different point of view, much less objectively. And I won’t claim that I am capable of seeing things with absolute clarity; far from it, in fact. But I try.

This is me trying to sort things out.

This is me separating the wheat from the chaff.

I can see the things in the email that are undeniable; there are things that I am accused of that are, unfortunately, true. At least to enough of an extent that bringing them up — even as pointedly as said accusations were made, under the guise of getting things of the chest — is valid and warranted. Although, again, some people really need to work on presentation.

Interestingly, though, some of these accusations are immediately followed with statements that smack of such amazing delusion or lack of self-awareness that it’s a little frightening. And I can’t help but wonder, even now, nearly twelve hours later, if that’s an astounding lack of self-perception, or if it’s something that has to be said in order to preserve the good guy status quo?

This is me airing my dirty laundry in public.

This is me finding my own sense of closure.

There are people who will read this and think that it’s filled with my classic vague tone, and go on to read other, more interesting and less self-involved things on the web. There are a few people who will read this and know exactly what I’m talking about, and this will probably piss them off a little.

This is me not really giving a shit.

There are a lot of people that can figure out (without a whole lot of energy) what this is about. Birmingham is a small, small, getting smaller everyday sort of place, and the blogging community is even smaller. This is the reason that I’m not naming names (though, as noted by Sarah Silverman among many others, if you fall into the life of a comedian, you’re probably gonna end up being turned into a joke; ditto writers).

Yeah, I could have said a lot of this in the email response that I typed — a four or five sentence email that took an agonizing twenty minutes to write (in comparison, this little bit of detritus went from brain to screen in about fifteen, not counting typo correction time). But like I said, I had decided that this chapter is closed and finished as of the moment that I hit send on that email. Things are what they are, and the only thing that an angry email, no matter how valid, would accomplish is making me feel better through making someone else feel small.

And, I figure, why do that? It changes nothing, and besides: I should have known better from minute one.

This is me hopefully learning a lesson, finally.

This is me looking forward.

This is a period.