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Love is not something we must try hard to do, love comes naturally, it is trusting that love is enough—That is the hard thing to do. It sounds simple, but even when the simple answer is right in front of us, since the feeling is complicated, we often pass up the right answer to look for a complicated answer to match it.
In the 1300s somewhere between seventy-five and two-hundred million people died from the black plague, which was a bacteria carried by fleas. Fleas are not a new problem, and the cure has been widely known long before the 1300s. It was simply to shave your hair off, wear clothes made from something coarse like goat hair, and to cover your skin in ash. The fleas lay eggs that stick to our hair, and with the hair gone, there is nowhere for the eggs to stick. The ash has the chemical hydroxide, which is enough to make the skin unlivable for the fleas.
Everyone knew that anyone with a shaved head and ash on their skin meant that they knew they had fleas. To avoid the shame, many people would rather put up with the fleas, as long as other people didn’t think they had them. Maybe the quote before Mark Twain coined his was, “It's better to keep your hair and appear free from fleas than shave your head and remove all doubt.”
Besides itching and inflammation, fleas were fine… sort of… that is, until those fleas got infected with the plague, and spread that deadly infection. Instead of shaving their heads, people tried any other thing, and about half of Europe died.
We shouldn’t be embarrassed to be human, and we shouldn’t feel stupid that we’re embarrassed, we should just talk about it, and get over it. Feeling unworthy of connection just for being human is the emotional plague, and we won’t know what it means to be human until we talk to other humans and realize they are scared and confused and definitely not perfect either.
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