Everybody wants a reason for everything, it's so much easier with someone or something to blame.

Sometimes when I think back to the days when I shared this incredibly intimate experience of feeling and creating and being and expressing with people to whom I could hardly be closer, I am overcome with sadness. This is another lifetime - another time line where we continued to grow together and move forward to impact people's lives in a positive fashion - that has passed by.

"And when these walls come crashing down what will we hide behind? All the things we're looking for are so far from what we find."

How serendipitous for me to have written that with them. It is a question I've spent many years trying to answer, but for most part have I given up on that. I think that what I have found is that eventually we are left with nothing to hide behind. We just have to face that things happened the way they did and discover that being heartbroken - which is totally okay to be for however long you need - over being forced to leave behind that one thing that kept everything together for you doesn't mean you have nothing left. Even if what you find is not what you wanted, you are not left empty-handed.

When I was 14 I went to a summer camp where people built intensely close bonds in one short week while we worked on developing essential life and leadership skills. At the end of that week everyone would part ways. Back then we didn't have the ability to keep in touch via social media. We had AIM and MSN Messenger and home phones, but it wasn't nearly as easy to keep in touch and still be a part of each other's lives as it is now. So on our last day we sobbed, me especially. I had never really experienced what it was like to have close friends like that where I didn't immediately start lying to them to try and make myself seem like someone I wasn't. It hurt knowing that I felt accepted for the first time in my entire life and that I wouldn't see them again. I went back home to face the darkness in my heart alone again. About two weeks later I got a picture in the mail of our group standing together after our final team building exercise. On the back it read, "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." At the time I felt like that was exactly how I should see it, but now I reject that. I think you can cry because it's over AND also smile because it happened. You're allowed to feel the totality of the human experience.

That's how I feel about losing that part of my life with those guys that were closer than family to me. My heart still aches when I try to play music because of how much it hurt to have that ripped away from me by the people I trusted most in the world. However, I was happy when I was there. Every part of that experience was real. The love that I shared with my best friends was real. The fun we had, the support we provided each other, the companionship on this journey through life...all of it was real. I still cry sometimes, but that's okay. I also smile even if I am a little sad behind it. So I reject the notion that you can't be both.

I have a catchphrase I hold onto from every one of my friends. One of my best friends while in a residential treatment center in Utah used to quote Kahlil Gibran's "On Pain" all the time and it has become the catchphrase I held onto from him.

It reads...

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

...maybe one day I will be able to create again without feeling like I am going to collapse from the weight of my heavy heart. For now I will forgive myself for smiling through the pain and crying through the happiness.