I Would Hate You If I Could – Turnover

A video a made in downtown San Antonio, TX. Hope you guys like it. Enjoy!

X & Y

Let me ask you a quick question.

Who is it that you think you are?

Do you have an image of yourself that you drew in a sketchbook somewhere long ago, or have you just been the paint splattered on the canvas by the artist not sure of where to go?

Asking yourself who or what you are is a very hard thing to do. Sometimes I lie in the corner of my room on the fringe of my mattress, and I wonder what it is I have gotten myself into, who it is that I’ve become. I used to have these ideas of myself that I thought I would be able to uphold and maintain, but in reality, i was just building cages around myself, not knowing I could easily get out. All of my life, I’ve tricked myself into thinking that I was the one in control of the making of myself, when in reality, I’m only everything I was programmed to be. I was hardwired to love and like certain things, and it was only a matter of discovering those things for me to know I truly liked them. I felt like I had grown a likeness to those things on my own, by my own will, when in reality, they’ve been there all along.

It’s almost depressing thinking that you didn’t make who you were. You just simply like the things you do because the appeal to something within you that you had no part in choosing.

But then there’s this moment, a moment for all moments in which we have to take hold of who we are. There’s this moment in which you realize you can’t decide who you are, but you sure as hell can decide what you are. Are you a liar, a coward, a man afraid of failure? Are you an honest man, a man of courage, a man set on chasing his dreams and floating amongst the stars?

You can’t change who you are, but by God you can change what you do with who you are.

There is a time where you sit down and evaluate everything you’ve become and reminisce on what it was that you wanted to be. You wonder if it gets better, if you are enough for yourself. Are you satisfied? Or do you want more? More of you, more of everything you think you could’ve been if you had only given yourself the chance. The world tells you that you have to either love who you are or chase the image of yourself that you can love and refuse to love yourself until you are that image.

Well that’s bullshit.

Look deep down inside of you. Think of all the music you like, the movies, the games, the jokes and the people. Bask in how they make you happy and how they make you feel alive. You love them don’t you? All the things that leave you with a smile from cheek to cheek? Newsflash: they are a part of you. They are everything you are, so love not only the things that make you happy, love yourself. I understand we don’t all look like we would want, talk like we want, walk like we want, but we need to learn to love the things we can’t control because they are the reasons why we love what we love. If it wasn’t for the parts of us that wish we could change, happiness would never have been found in the unique jokes and people we’ve come to love. We would all be the same, and art and passion could never exist.

Now stand back and look at your life. There are things you want to do, so much you want to accomplish but are so unsure that you can fulfill your wishes. If you want to cut down on your weight, change your look, get your dream job, complete a bucket list: feel free to do it. Do everything in your power to get what you want. But before you go conquering planet earth, learn to love the core of you, the part of you that has never changed, always constant like the stars in the sky or the beauty of the rose. Don’t base your happiness on the things that can change so easily, the things in your life that fluctuate so quickly.

Love yourself enough to stay true to who you were born to be. Being what you truly want to be will only be a result of who you are. Being who you were born to be and being what you want go hand in hand. You are the constant and your dreams are the variables. Dreams come and go but you will always stay the same. The X & Y of the equation of life. The equation of you.

Love yourself.

Embrace your flaws.

Be what you want, it’s only who you are.

to those who are listening.

-Gideon Reyes

love yourself.

I want to write to everyone, I want to address the world.

I want my hands to flow freely, and for others to see the things I think and love every word let loose from my mind, but at the end of the day I am just a man behind the humble pen. I am just a man bound by ink and paper. I am just a poor soul looking for undeserving attention, looking for a way out of the cycle that continues to loop in his mind. A man trapped by his thoughts and theories and subject to the eternal speculation from within himself. I tell myself that I shouldn’t be so creative, I shouldn’t be so rebellious, or unfathomably curious.

But I am. I am human. I am good. I am bad. I am right. I am wrong. I am justice. I am corruption. I am health. I am disease. I love. I hate. I inhale. I exhale. I live. I die. I run. I crawl. I shout. I weep. I am joy. I am despair.

I am nothing.

But I am everything.

Good people, it is about time we stop telling ourselves “we aren’t good enough,” “we aren’t lovely,” “we are not worth anything.”

For heaven’s sake you are. You are good enough. I think you are lovely, I think you are worth it, all of it. And for your sake, love yourself. Love yourself more than your money, or status, or job, or beauty, or health, or future, or past. Before you can love your insecure wife, your ignorant husband, your overprotective parents, your nerve racking kids, your idiotic friends, your vicious mother-in-law, your schizophrenic uncle, your widowed aunt, your cancer ridden neighbor, or any person on the face of our dear planet, good God my dearest men and women, you have to love YOU.

You have to love you.

It’s only human to feel wanted. To feel free. To be tired of being forsaken by your thoughts and abandoned by the people you once called home. When people seem to only be passing by, people only stay until you have nothing left to give, till you have nothing left to offer, nothing left to say, nothing left to bring to the table, for every inch of good left in this world, I pray you love yourself to no speakable end. Till their words don’t matter, till their lies don’t penetrate, and their deceit turns to ash, till their hate has no place to lay its head but on the broken asphalt you have left behind.

There is no past, for it is dead. There is no future, for it has not been written in stone.

Find peace within yourself my fellow man. Love who you are, and love who you aren’t.

You are more than human, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.

To those listening…

-Gideon Reyes.