by Gretel

Created on: September 26, 2009

Yesterday, she was a little girl, smiling, laughing, But somewhere in between yesterday and today she looked around and no one was watching. Then the dawn of today brought about a new horizon. She learned how to get people to watch again. To be watched, one must entertain, she found. And so she did. And it worked.

It was only when she made them laugh that she earned her attention, her society, her self-worth, her glory, her esteem, even her name.

Any hint of seriousness seemed to eclipse all of that. She wondered why it all vanished when she was serious, pensive, and contemplative. It seemed as if the weight of the wonder, the price of the pain, and the fullness of the feeling were too heavy for anyone else to bear hearing, for when first attempting to express them, she was not met with the multitude of human response as the humor commanded, but instead with a wall of silence shadowed by her own guilt for even daring to reveal something even remotely serious.

Perhaps she thought she could make people happy by acting happy. And maybe she believed she could make people care by acting care-free.

But instead, perhaps she lost something. She lost herself.

Today, she is realizing that she may have been hiding the true essence of who she is all along. The serious side. The side she thinks she has to hide from the world because she's afraid tears translate too tender a heart. Too sensitive a spirit. Too weak a mind. Too fragile a faith. Too hopeless a case. Too...much.

At the end of the day, she will realize more deeply that it is more the hurts, the heartache, and the hardships that truly define her. Deny those, and she denies herself.

And still, as time goes on, she may lose the volume of response her silliness gave her, but she will no longer lose herself. How ironic it is that she tried to be funny to be seen, but she became invisible, anyway. Isn't that funny? She became invisible, anyway.

From this point forward, she may feel invisible to the rest, but her serious side intuitively knows she must look to the unseen. The seen and temporal are but a vapor, but the unseen is the portal to eternity.

She has unsettlingly found that if she is too readily regarded as silly, carefree, and constantly full of humor and when she's known only for cracking jokes, she soon becomes one herself.

And at the end of the day, even the comic relief deeply desires relief. And maybe all she really wants is a listening ear for her seriousness, a shoulder for her tears, and an elusive, abstract noun known as respect.

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