And when I wake for goodness' sake, these are the songs I'll keep singin'

I have been reading a translation of Anne Frank's diary into German*, just saw at the back an advertisement for a book by a childhood friend of Anne's and knew that Jacqueline van Maarsen could not have guessed when she was a child that that particular friendship would be a topic which thousands of people would want to read about later. It put me back in touch with the truth that you cannot treat any human being with too much respect. It makes me wonder how many of the people whose lives are tangent to mine, how many  old classmates and acquaintances or current Facebook friends, are living with thoughts too big to share with me, and even too weighty to share with the people much closer to them. 


I have been working on being alright with myself, on feeling confident enough about who I am and what my past joys and mistakes have been to see who I want to become. A friend introduced me to a video called "How To Be Alone" yesterday, and it gave me a lot of momentum.


I have been seeing so many people who didn't mean to end up where they are or, worse, don't want to be there. I think it would be more than alright in many ways to know a few things about myself and just see where they take me. That may, in fact, be the genuine best life path. 


At the same time, though, I want to know that my goals are formed of more than convenience or ambition. I want to become something(s) that I want to be, and not things for which I want to be recognized, and not things things that just don't make me uncomfortable.


I have been thinking about expectations and their dangers. We expect children to learn in a classroom, often on teachers' terms and not according to the individual shape of students' minds. We expect ourselves to be happy with reasonable situations, and don't allow for the emotions that run in monthly or yearly or decade-ly cycles and can pull us from functioning to stuck in our thoughts or to exhilaration at merely being alive in the space of a thought.


Goodness, I thought this was a post with a point but I am wandering again. Ah well, welcome to my mind.


This talk that a friend shared has helped me a lot in finding words for what I have been struggling with: Brene Brown at TEDxHouston. She talks about
*it was originally written in Dutch. I had been certain it was German to begin with, but the Frank family moved to the Netherlands in 1933 when Hitler came to power. So by the time Anne started writing in 1942 she was functioning in Dutch.


Title is from Weezer's Heart Songs