I would like to thank my enemies – the dissenters, the faceless commentators, the backstabbers, the Yelpers, the rats, the arguers, the contrarians…
You force me to rethink my worldview, to review my blueprints one more time. At the very least, you inspire me to double-underline the keywords in my poems. At best, you make me tear certain parts out.
Although we hate to admit it, our enemies make us think harder and faster than our friends. When we jump into “Oh no you didn’t!” mode furiously typing out our reply or waving a finger in the checkout line, we’re immediately alive and functioning at our peak.
It’s like waking up from a nap when the doorbell rings. You snap into action. And if that surprise visitor is a threat to your family or an unknown entity of any sort, you come alive all the more, completely forgetting about those clumsy feelings you woke up with.
We celebrate awakedness as sacred, something to always strive for because everything else is possible once you’re there. Enemies (and by this, I mean people with views and experiences that conflict with our own)… Enemies deliver that sacred awakedness more reliably than anything else in the external world.
They draw X’s through our prose as we write it, hang on the delete key laughing, come storming into the room reciting their own crappy poems. When once we were rotely typing out our lines, now we hunker down, more entrenched, more committed, and perhaps secretly skeptical of our great message.
The bastards deserve a round of applause.