The GGA Project -- Day #110 "Minor Setback, Major Shift"

Today I was haunted by an unsettling feeling that I couldn't seem to shake for most of the day.  It was late in the evening when I identified its source, which is this: I now know this blog is being read by a few people whom I'd rather had never known or cared about it.  And knowing that, I found myself enclosed in a vague feeling of discomfort.  I found myself wanting to return to a pattern I'd developed in recent years, which was to repress the parts of me that would have caused conflict in my relationship.  Namely, this meant repressing the desire to do the things I enjoyed and be the person I was at heart because doing so was risking harsh judgement, criticism, or belittlement.

Now, with all these days of new activities out there on the internet (of all places!), it's in the wide, wide open--what it is that I like to do for fun.  It's out there--the kind of people I like to spend time with.  It's out there--my sense of humor.  It's out there--my sense of reality and morality and normalcy.  It's out there--the person I am when nobody is there to demand that I change.

That naked feeling was pressing down on me and threatening to bring out a real, no-joke censor, a censor for my whole life.

Again.

Today's New Activity: Testing My Progress and Resolution

It occurs to me that today is the first measure of whether or not I have grown in the ways I've aimed to, in the ways I *thought* I had over the past few months.  I have to say it was a harder test than I expected, requiring constant vigilance, and checking and rechecking my work for errors in logic and the premises upon which it rested.  It even required lifelines, check-ins, reassurances.

I don't even care about the fact that I'm showing my vulnerability in saying this.  I don't mind that I have to admit it's hard to retrain my mind after so thorough a mental smack-down.

But at the end of today, the answer I reach is this: I can't hide any longer.  I can't pretend I'm anyone other than exactly whom I am.  And in my moments of most profound clarity, I find that it truly doesn't matter what anybody thinks about that, privately or publicly, thoughtfully or flippantly.  Nobody else has a say in that anymore.  The real truth is that nobody else ever did.

I don't mind that I may have to keep reminding myself of this, on paper or in thought.  At my core I know it's true.

And I will make this promise here: that I will ignore every censoring impulse I have, every thought I have about hiding my heart's desires and joys.  I will not let this part of my journey take a detour like the one I took when I stopped writing six years ago.  My every action will come from love instead of fear.  And every day, I will remember that my son is watching for his cue on what it is to be a citizen of this world.  I promise that, in me, he will see the fullest, most vibrant, and most unapologetic version of his mother that this lifetime could have produced.  And in doing so, he will have permission to be exactly whom it was he was meant to be.  And that version of him will be loved, as this version of me is as well.

Not sure I get an A on this test, but I know I passed, and that is enough for me, today.

Then, as post script, I offer this piece of beauty, just because I loved it once, and love it again.