Never Don't Give Up

When someone gets a tattoo, it's permanent.  The phrase "Never Don't give up" was tattooed onto some guy's bicep.its easy to mock at the shoddy grammatical implications, but at the same time, I think we all know what he meant.  Never give up, don't give up, it's all the same.  We know what he meant, and it's time to move on.

So what do we move on to?  A while back, I either read, listened to, or was told by someone, that "most men die at 30, but they are not buried until they are 80." That was a phrase that has been tattooed onto my brain for the last few months, especially as the dreaded 3-oh comes ever closer (6months and counting).

So what can be done about it?  Sometimes you need to look to where your advice is coming.  My advice has, strangely enough, come from, well, me.

Back when I was a teenager, I would write songs.  Not mopey emo songs, but what flowed from my brain, into my guitar, and onto paper, or into a computer microphone.  Last weekend I found buried in an old computers hard drive, a whole bunch of songs that I hadn't listened to in years.  Lyrics include...

"I won't let my dreams fade away" - (A Way Of Life)

"There's no need to be afraid, again" - (Outside)

"We're not going to run away from them, anymore" - (Anymore)

"I knew that my future, lied in schemes and lands so far away" - (Old Friends New Faces)

"You can fly like an Eagle, to all possibilities, and then soar like the eagle in the sky" - (in the sky)

For the first time, in a while, I started hearing some good advice.  Strangely it was coming from my 19 year old self.  It was me.  I was optimistic.  Nothing could stop me.  Nothing did.  I still here and I'm still fighting.  I have fought for almost everything in my life.  Family, education, freedom (My own that is), Friends, everything.  I have used the phrase "1 more fight left", which I now believe to be false.  I am a fighter.  I have never given up, and I choose not to in this instance.

Now here is the hard part.  Convincing a grown man, of 30, who the world has beat the crap out of a few times, to listen to a snot nosed burke, who sucked hard at the real world so badly, that he seized himself it of university.  Bt that kid had more than what I had.  He had supreme, albeit unfocused, optimism.  I know what I have to do, to point myself in the direction of what I want to do.  Do I ultimately listen to the fear and doubt that I hear every day?

Or do I listen to a person I can't let down, who will be hardest on me if I fail.  Myself.

That's why I should "Never/Don't give up"