I was tired. Tired of the same stupid mistake, tired of pretending to be shallow in order to avoid hard conversations, and tired of playing dodge-ball with everything I didn’t understand. The simple solution at first was to bury them somewhere deep, somewhere no one would ever find them. You know, those things you swear you will never talk about, the ones that you would rather just pretend never existed.

But here I was again and again. The same ugly truths tormenting me mercilessly. There comes a point in your life where you look at something or someone and you swear you will never become like that. But one day you wake up and there you are. It’s like a deja vu mirror haunting you, laughing at you. At some point it went from curiosity, to mistake, to habit, to lifestyle.

And finally imprisonment.

We all have something that holds us captive. Something that eats away at our core, something that pulls our heart apart one blood vessel at a time. Some people deal with this in a spiritual sense, others deal with it, well… Honestly I have no idea how.

In my heart I know that the answer is always God. I know it always has been and always will be. But in my actions I reflect a certain level of doubt and self-obsession, a “do it my way approach”, or an “I am my own God” type thought process.

Life is simply a beautiful renegade. A fleeting memory that will do nothing more than desert you and betray you. It is a treacherous allegiance. Yet somehow it is wonderful. Somehow that beautiful renegade, so dark and twisted to its core, is beautiful.

The beauty that we find in this sick and twisted journey comes from the lessons in those mistakes. And where the renegade is constantly trying to seduce us, overpower us, and blind us, there is a lesson that lurks in the shadows. The renegade is beautiful because of our ability to get back up after having been so brutally put down.

This beautiful renegade has shown us time and time again that no matter how painful something is, there is always beauty to be found within that pain. And whether you believe in God or not we’ve been given a life surrounded by beauty.