Abandoned & bruised awaiting a cure

In my current stint of being unemployed I have been doing a lot of reading, which isn't anything new or different for me. But this particular day (yesterday), something I read really made me think. I was lying by the pool of my apartment complex with some younger girls from church when I picked up Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and began to read.

I'm not really sure how long I had been reading, but it was long enough for the girls to migrate to the other end of the pool to discuss life, while dipping their pedicured toes in the water, and for me to read 140 pages. Once you get past the fact that this book was written by a lawyer, a senator and a politician, you realize that this book is about identity, about a son, a friend, a husband and a father. It made me stop and think about my own identity and my passions.

One of my passions is civil rights and African-American history, which first prompted me to read this book. Don't get me wrong, I support Obama more for his politics than the fact that he is of mixed race and struggled during one of the more fascinating time periods of US history. He just makes me think.

At one point in the book his grandfather's friend tells him, "But your grandfather will never know what that feels like," in reference to being black, experiencing the hurt of racism and trying to find your identity living as a black man in a white family. I stopped there and began listening to the girls' chatter. Being further than an earshot away, it was mere whisper in the late afternoon wind that was beginning to blow. They were talking about being orphans and meeting their birth parents, and for the first time it struck me that I will never know what that feels like. That should be an obvious, but when you really look at the implications and what it means it's mind blowing. I will never experience what these young girls have no matter how hard I try. I began to think of other disparities: we grew up in different areas, we are all of different ethnicity. I realized what a role that played in the depth of our friendships and in the depths of our souls and our identity.

I will never know what it fees like to be black and to come up through the struggles of the last 100+ years, but then again, they will never know how it feels to be white. It was completely chance or luck depending on how you look at it, and this effects our friendships. I've come to the point in my life where I don't want to hide my true self any longer, but I'm beginning to wonder what I hold back from people because of our differences...