What I Let the Noise Decide

There is a fury that lived in me like a season that could not find the right weather to break into, turning inward when it had nowhere honest to go,
There is a fury that lived in me aimed at outcomes and yet I kept aiming as though volume and feeling would eventually matter,
There is a fury that lived in me aimed outward which was the gap between what I needed and what the world around me was willing to offer,
How many hours have I spent directing real energy at circumstances that were never going to respond to me the way a person who really cared about me even if I never ask,
There is a fury that lived in me only to find the target unmoved and the anger now living entirely inside with nowhere left to go...

I have given the most faithful attention to moments that had already closed their doors and left me in the middle of a feeling they were never going to come back,
I have given the most faithful attention and called it to be honest about this pain, when what I was actually doing was using this as a reason to avoid the harder work underneath it,
I have given the most faithful attention so many times that I have started to confuse the intensity of the feeling with the validity of the grievance,
If the circumstance that I keep re-living in my chest could it actually hear me back and would it change anything about how I am spending the energy I keep pouring into,
I have given the most faithful attention and found that the situation was unchanged and the time was gone and I had to pay the price for how hard I felt it...

There is a truth about myself that I have worked very hard and it deserved more protection from me than I gave it before I sent it out to be encountered,
There is a truth about myself that I kept returning every doubt that felt like a failure it is the faithfulness of that returning is the bravest and most overlooked thing I have ever done,
There is a truth about myself that I know, regardless of how confident that voice sounds when it speaks about what I have made, you cannot please everybody,
Can I actually locate in my body right now the difference between a response to that I genuinely need to hear or only agreeing with every doubt in myself,
There is a truth about myself that was alive and does not require their consensus to remain true even on the days when their voices are louder than my own...

I have let the noise decide what the quiet already knew, remember what I actually believed before I handed the deciding over to a voice that was never inside the real maker
I have let the noise decide around the confidence and called it growth when what it actually was was surrender dressed in the language of being open-minded,
I have let the noise decide so many times that the original version of what I thought has become difficult to locate beneath all the layers of other people's reactions I piled on top of it,
What would I actually think about what I have made if I could sit with it in complete silence without a single outside voice arriving to inform me what my real opinion should be,
I have let the noise decide too often and stayed too long, but the quiet truth of what I knew never stopped being true just because I stopped listening. It waited. It always waits. And I am finally quiet enough to hear it again…

Watchwords:
Fury aimed at what was never listening,
The reaction cost only me in the end,
My truth lived before their opinion arrived,
The noise decided what the quiet already knew,
The original truth is still waiting under there...