True to Your Heart

There is something about giving blood that I absolutely love. I'm not entirely sure why since most of the times I have given blood, something bad has happened, or I get really sick afterwards. Yesterday was the latter. I think it was still worth it though. I have a relatively rare blood type, and I think it's important to give blood as often as I can because I know it can help someone. I wonder if there is a time when altruisim does become bad though. Maybe when it becomes harmful, not to others, but to you.

It is so easy to live a life trying to please all the people around you, to tiptoe through every day, trying to step on the smallest number of toes possible. I have to admit that many days that seems like the easiest way to get from dawn to dusk. It's always nice for everyone around you, the ones who get to watch the contortions of your body as you bend over backwards to please everyone else. It's easy because you never have to look at what you really desire for yourself. Or try and go out and get it.

When you have the feelings of others to use as an excuse to not seek what you know is best for you, what you really want in your life, how are you living your own life? Are you? Or are you living the life others want for you, or worse yet, want for themselves? It can be so easy to not try and get another job a little farther away from home, although you know you would love the challenge, because you think your parents might miss you too much. Or not get into another relationship because you worry that someone else you care about might be hurt. It is only too easy to put your life on hold until you are convinced that your actions won't hurt someone else, that no one in your life will feel left behind or pushed aside in order for you to get what you want. In the end though, that doesn't leave you your own life. It leaves you a second class version of someone else's.

A friend sent me this poem when I was discussing this with him:

~It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.~

More than simply encouraging me to follow my own heart, it reminded me that when I'm not true to myself and I am not willing to follow my own heart, then I am not trustworthy. I will constantly put the feelings of others before what I feel and I will always be in a state of betrayal to my own soul. If I am so willing to betray myself and my own feelings, doesn't that then make me willing to betray others, regardless of how inadvertently?

It is truly important to consider the feelings of others, and how much good your actions will cause, as well as how much hurt. I truly believe that and I do my very best to follow that. Somedays though, even in such mundane actions as giving blood, I need to consider the repercussions in my own life, how heavy that betrayal is to myself and if I can still possibly remain true to my heart.