So here it is, for all those 'heavy' people out there.
'People LITE' is an advertising LIE.
Personally I want my mates fully caffeinated, filled with sugar and fire and spice, and regret and anger and pain and pleasure. People who've had a range of experiences and are equipped with a complete palette of emotions and then some. I want friends who won't go bland on me when I'm an idiot, but get angry. I like it when people require things of me. I don't mean needy, as such. They challenge the world to practice kindness, ask difficult questions when people are pretending there hasn't been a mistake, prick at complacency and create the spark in the air required for creative storms. Society needs them.
People who have had a lot of heavy to carry develop great emotional biceps. They also have great courage. Anyone who can get out of bed in the morning and raise happy kids when they're wrestling massive inner turmoil deserves a medal. You might think that you wouldn't want them around if things get difficult, but the truth is that they could probably handle anything. I've experienced teeth-chattering terror twice in my life: once was real and once was a product of my imagination. They felt the same. Only, imaginary fears aren't an event in the world - everything else must carry on. You have to get up, share a breakfast table, try to hold a conversation, fail and go to work anyway. There things may only get harder, not least because you've realised that you're not really equipped for normality. Try to sleep. Repeat.
When my friends are a little bit hunted or haunted, when their past bangs at the door in an unwanted rage, the last thing they need is to feel like a toxic misfit. A broken past can mean a life spent in making: not necessarily a bad thing... A daily meditation on being constructive; raising children whose principles go past convention and will furnish them with a gut knowledge of what is right or wrong in any culture: to be the kind of people who won't write someone off with one word or that awful phrase 'hard work'. Or write them off at all.
I know a lot of women will hear me when I say: Let us not diminish our splendids or constrain our heavies for the comfort of others. It would clip our wings and it would also deny them the chance to have life ask something of them. Does it really happen all that often?
So, to my heavy friend; hang in there. Please forgive me for being too much the sledge-hammer, but most of all, please, please don't be sorry for being 'heavy'.