It’s easy to underestimate the importance of caring about the relationships in your life. There is a misconception that those connections that the most important to us must withstand all challenges while the others who are not as integral to our well being might not matter that much. Both of these statements discard the complexities of relationships and our basic needs as well.

Like many people you’ve probably heard phrases such as ‘never give up!’ Truly a powerful phrase, although you can only keep tackling the same situations with the same approach until it comes back to bite you in the butt. This in turn becomes stressful and very hard to keep up with especially if it’s scolding your kids every time they don’t finish their chores. Why does this happen? Ultimately, when situations arise that aren’t ideal we tend to emphasize things in a way that takes power away. I have witnessed this myself with how people talk to each other expecting things to be ‘done’ correctly. This color of seeing something as ‘wrong’ and fighting to fix it creates two opposing sides. With two opposing sides the reaction is to defend yourself and fight back because it’s human nature! Of course a child will fight back, they might even cut deep with their words which perpetuates this duel further. Wouldn’t it be swell if there was a way to skip that stress and extra fight just to make sure your child not only gets their chores done, but also learns mutual respect?

The older I get the more I see people’s true colors, I’m not even sure if a truly “good” person even exists at all. Sometimes it really affects me. I want to see the good in everyone and I can, but then as time goes on the not so good surfaces and you are left to wonder if the “good” is good enough?! So you weigh things out and try to explain why a person might be this way or that.. what/who helped create these “bad” parts? Can you help them? Can you support them? Take their abuse? Love them anyway???

“Pass it here. Quick!” Billy kicked the can over to Donny. Donny kicked the soda can through an imaginary goal, “Score!” So caught up in their play, the boys didn’t see Brent Flanagan watching them from his picture window.

What does it mean to be human?

Now that she had healed from the accident and trying to move on with her life Kristi wanted to find a friend to go out with occasionally. The only problem is that she wasn’t one to go out to bars alone and her old friends had moved away. Kristi wasn’t looking for a serious relationship when she joined the dating site; someone to have fun with.

Positively Positive Education Productions is a black, transgender person living with HIV since birth; dating is difficult even more of a challenge when you are aromantic and asexual too. For starters, my HIV is not a death sentence; I am a longterm non-progressor, sometimes called elite controllers who are individuals infected with HIV, maintains a CD4 count greater than 500 without antiretroviral therapy with a detectable viral load (Kumar, 2013). Basically, my immune system is like a normal person without HIV; I never had to take medicine; however, I still go to the doctors twice each year to complete labs to make sure my viral load is manageable (I've been doing this since I was born). Currently, now I take a HIV medicine called Genvoya (a $1,000 a month medicine for 30 pills) and I've been taking it for about a year now at the age of 29. I'm glad I have health insurance or else I would be struggling.

Waging wars begins from a land of hate. Passion is left beyond the aftermath from a life that once could have been saved. Picking up the illusions seeing the harsh tones of the shadows in the depleted black. Decades to witnessing the silence towards the deeply wounded expressing the ways of finding heaven. A world filled with separations of non-gender equality to the bare minimum towards the right to fight for your loved ones. A man’s sexuality can be tested through lengths of hatred by the same race to the one’s who held many ancestors for the sake of their strengths that were led to a misfortune. From every aspect to never getting the recognition from his birthplace, imagining the days it took to bring him to this very point. Some will never experience the care they needed combing hatred in his presence leading him in the darkest epiphanies living through another dream. Yet the clouded judgement filled with a six-foot hole and his everlasting regrets. Taking his life in his hands, her savior needed protection from the state of mind corrupting what she once called mine. The love from a woman returned as a natural essence of her character. Never to second guess the anti-social requests from a family member. She was lost, from being judge day by day for living a simple truth, or simply because she would never live a lie. Carving the healing wounds deeper to the root of her actions, masking in the fact that there were no options. Paled faces exist in her reflection, her secluded areas turned into the shallowest of rejections. She fell in love with the animations of her features. Holding in no boundaries in between both parts of their separation. Love came at the price of loneliness, it came with a heavy heart. But it left with nothing.

Letter to my friend…

In part one of this series I dealt with the signs that indicate you may be an empath. In part 2 the focus will be on how to maintain when you are in crowds where there is a lot of negativity. Depending on the culture you have been exposed to you may have head the following: In today's culture terms such as positive and negative vibes or energy are popular. In some church denominations they teach that people can drain your spirit or attempt to decrease the "anointing" or power of the Creator that is flowing through you. Healthprep suggests that empaths learn how to handle their extreme sensitivity because we often feel worse than the individual we are feeling empathetic about. This causes those who have this unique ability to feel as if they are carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

As a child and even to this day I have always been over sensitive. I cry over situations that don't seem to bother others and I can often look at someone and tell what they are going through. Once a woman stood up in church and as she began to walk across the sanctuary, she stopped abruptly, put her hand on her side, squinted her eyes and winced as if in pain. I told my husband that cancer had returned and was in her bones. A few months later the pastor had this woman stand up and said, and I quote: "The church didn't know this but the cancer came back and was in her bones." The church may not have known, but my husband and I did.

The Butterfly Effect is the scientific theory that a single occurrence, no matter how small, can change the course of the Universe forever. The term Butterfly Effect comes from the idea that if a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the earth, it is said to cause a hurricane on the other side. The butterfly’s wings are said to create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may alter the path of a tornado, delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain area. The flapping of the butterfly’s wings becomes an essential part of the initial conditions that resulted in a tornado.