When people ask me if I am an optimist or a pessimist, I tell them quite simply that I am a realist. I dream for the best, but know that the worst might occur. I hate sappy romance movies because they never stay true to life, yet secretly I root for the happy ending. I want the fantasy to be a reality.

When I was younger, my mother would become so upset with me because I always had to have things as black and white–no room for gray. She used to tell me that things are not always black and white and that I had to accept that sometimes there is just gray. I never could. I still cannot. I tell people that in order to get gray, you must mix the black and the white. Sure, it applies to colors, but it can apply to life too. People only accept the gray because they do not want to accept the truth.

Your husband left you because he is a man that cannot control his worldly urges. He will realize late on in life that he missed out on a good thing. He will be lonely in his later years, but he is only thinking of the now. People live for the now thinking tomorrow is not guaranteed, yet when tomorrow comes, they are stuck with the consequences of their actions.

Your baby was stillborn because that is life. Not because you were a bad person, or God turned his back on you. If we knew exactly why tragedies occurred, we would prevent them, but since a tragedy is just that [a tragedy], we cannot go on fishing for answers that just are not there.

Shit happens.

You cheated because for a moment you only cared about yourself. You let go of any attachments to anyone else and gave in to your own urges. Your urges were there because you were weak, because your partner beat you down, because your partner gave up on you, because your partner stopped believing in you, because you stopped believing in love, because you wanted more, because you mistook lust for something more, because of any other reason other than the excuse that “you don’t know”.

“I don’t know” is just a cop out.

We know why we do what we do. Deep down we know. We know why we are the evil that we are or the good that we try to be.

We know the why, we just do not know how to deal with it.

It is black and white. It just is not always pretty.

Gray is just a manifestation of the black and white at battle with each other. Whenever chaos occurs, people always ask ‘why’. They have to know the reasoning for everything to make sense. Otherwise, it just eats at them. Yet often when we find out the ‘why,’ we cannot accept it. We cannot accept that one man would actually kill for no reason at all. We cannot accept that people would take lives off of a blind order to do so. We cannot accept the inhumanity. Yet it exists. But we insist on creating the gray matter; there always has to be more to it…right?

I cannot accept that gray exists without the black and white to create it.