Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

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I needed to hear this today.

Not that I know exactly who myself is, and not because I'm not afraid - I am terrified. I am terrified of actually being myself. I have no idea what that will look like. I do know I've made steps, that I sometimes like myself when I actually get a tiny glimpse.

Still, I hold most of my real self back.

I spent a childhood being told who I was, was not okay, an adolescence being angry and hating myself, an young adulthood desperately pretending that I was okay and doing what I wanted, and now I'm breaking that down and wondering who I actually am.

Perhaps I need to fall and cry and have gobs of snot run down my face to know.

For now I turn to my dear friend poetry to remind me where I want to go.

Love After Love

The time will come, when with elation,

 you will greet yourself arriving

 at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome

and say, sit here.  Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

 Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.

all your life, whom you have ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

 peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

                                                                                      Dereck Walcott

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,

for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

And wait without love.  For love would be love,

of the wrong thing. 

Yet there is faith.

But the faith and the hope and the love, are all in the waiting.

And the darkness shall be the light

and the stillness the dancing. 

                                             T.S. Elliot

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving,

 and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence

 might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems to be dead in winter and later proves to be alive.  Now I'll count to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.
                                                                                          Pablo Neruda

"It may be when we no

 longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work,

 and that when we no longer know which way to go,

 we have begun our real journey."

                                                 Wendell Berry

Sweet Darkness

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds except

the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the

sweet confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

                                    David Whyte