Back in the saddle

I’m just going to go ahead and write here as an experiment in ‘unleashing the hounds.’ It’s been too long since I’ve put pen to paper. Even my journal entries, which used to be much more consistent have tapered off.

This year has felt both like an invitation to invest in my own growth and becoming and at the same time like a thick sludge of resistance that buries me in old patterns of hiding under the covers. I’m tired of pushing but I’m also afraid of playing small. I do a lot of courses and learning – I’ve had a miscarriage this year and now I’m pregnant again. We are moving a few months after the baby is born and I am both motivated and completely unmotivated and overwhelmed.

This all makes sense- it’s so reasonable, and yet there is a strong part of me that wants to keep fighting to be relevant, to share, to be seen and to show up.

One thing I can say is that I’m pretty good at trudging on- staying the course. In that way, you could say that I have great discipline and staying power. I don’t often give up, or maybe more specifically, I don’t give up on others and their expectations but my own projects and ambitions are often put on the back burner.

Recently, I got in the driver’s seat for the first time in years – literally. I have been so afraid of ‘taking my seat’ or being in charge and fucking everything up that I’ve avoided that position altogether- preferring to be a bit more in the background, and if I’m honest, less vulnerable and exposed.

Something I’m sifting through at the moment is the difference between the need to communicate and be seen and the compulsion to be validated and received by the world in a way that upholds a sense of identity. Maybe it’s impossible to have one without the other, but I’m trying to separate them out a bit.

This is why I’m going to write these entries without any need to publish them. Right now, that level of being seen and exposed feels very dangerous. It wasn’t always that way. I used to put things out all the time. Now, it feels that I have to be very careful about how I communicate – should I be misunderstood and miscast as a really shitty person.

In the end, there’s not much I can do about that and maybe that’s really none of my business. Still, being ‘out there’ on the inter webs feels pretty vulnerable.

I guess what I’m getting to is why it scares me so much. What part of myself am I afraid I will expose, and isn’t part of the that exposure also my freedom and the ticket back to my humanity?

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