Mirror

If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself then make a change...
~M. Jackson

For as long as I can remember I have been plagued by this sense that everything is "Now or Never," but also, it is coupled with this desperate feeling that somehow each moment is a judgment of my own worth.

Ugh. I can't recommend this foolishness. It is heavy and exhausting.

When I first began blogging it was on a blog of a different name; begun as a means to find my voice.
When I was 9 years old I stayed the night at the house of another little girl, Jenny, who shared with me a page of her journal. It was one of those tiny little girl diaries with gilt edged pages and an itty-bitty golden lock. As she read the entry, describing her day, I thought to myself, "I could never write like that," and "there is nothing so interesting about me." I decided in that moment that I was both dull and a poor writer. Heh. Nevermind that I had never written anything not assigned to me in my 4 year school career... I was quite sure of this assessment, however.

Somehow, though I had also begun a lifelong infatuation with the idea of journaling. It was something that I longed to do. Over the years I managed to collect nearly a dozen beautiful journals... all bearing no more than an entry or two. It seems that though the exquisite little books called to me, I couldn't find the words to fill them... or perhaps... judged them inadequate to fill such pretty pages.

How I got here is a bit of a blur. Somehow it seemed easier to dump my (judged meaningless) words onto a digital (erasable) page than those gorgeous books that seemed to beg for poetry. And so it began... if only I had known where it was going to go I would likely have succumbed to performance anxiety before ever leaving the gate. :-p It all happened so fast. The phone calls, and the emails, the editors, the agents, the managers, the producers... all calling me a writer... speaking to me as if I knew this... planned this... knew what to do with it. Secretly... here's a confession... it felt like a joke.

Such things flew in the face of everything that I believed about myself, but I tried (oh so hard!) to believe and keep going. To pretend that I was still writing to a great big void... that no one was listening and that it was all just my unimportant thoughts on a digital (erasable) page.

But you know what? In the past 18 months I have filled two of those untouchably beautiful little books I have collected, and I have written (and not erased) some 200 posts here. And it feels so good. Every single time I write, it feels so good. The love that you all give just adds an inexplicable joy to the whole thing. Really. The emails that you send; they often make me cry. The comments; they just fill me up. You're all so beautiful for sharing this journey with me, for helping me to see myself more clearly, and for time and again, pulling me from the lonely world that I tend to retreat to... this false idea of isolation and separateness that we human beings seem to feel so sharply sometimes.

It's a path that I am so very glad that I followed. It's a journey that I continue to try to embrace more fully. A gift that I try to allow myself more often. There are so many things that happen each day that I wish that I would have recorded here... shared here. Yet so many times that I allowed myself to fall back into that foolishness of "unworthiness."

I see, or am starting to see anyhow, that my life is all of the things that I secretly hoped that it would be. Most of all, it is a really full life... waiting all of the time to become even more full.

As they say, Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and I am venturing again to stop judging and begin living more fully, more freely...
And I will keep at it until I wake one day to truly understand that I don't have to try anymore... that I already am.

Thank you for helping me to be more true to myself... for giving me a reason so that I could learn that I am reason enough.