Becoming real

It has been so good to have loving people around me again. It gives me a chance to start to be me and I have not had that in such a long time. When you see the best in someone and welcome them in in the midst of their suffering and despair, when you see the light in them,  you often give them a chance to express their potential, to become what they are as opposed to living the so many living deaths that it is possible to live, and what they are so often is not bad or broken, but essentially good, just waiting to be given a chance.

This is grace. Feelings of entitlement bar the entry of gratitude in the heart. Everything I do, and I particularly think about this when I am taking a shower, lately, but it is true even of the less pleasant activities, I get to. I get to be alive right now. My heart may break but I get to feel it. I get to, I get to, I get to… that is grace.

I have been through a process that I cannot explain in any rational way, one where old knots become untied and expose old wounds that run so deep that perhaps kept me from truly appreciating everything I have, this short and precious life, and all the encounters I have in it. My heart has been broken and I have broken my own heart. I don’t know if there was any other way but to break my heart somehow, to melt away those ego structures and wounds that kept me from growing, and maybe I have broken my heart irreparably, burned bridges that will never be put back together again. I don’t know what to do with that. Some people may set their image of me in stone, and see me for my past actions and faults and weaknesses, and I cannot do anything to turn back time or change anyone’s perceptions of me. When I was trapped between a rock and a hard place I acted so immaturely, and though I so regret the ways I did that, and am so sad about those people who may have respected me that likely think poorly of me now, I feel like I had to do that in one way or another. It is like I wanted others to see me in a poor light to break my own heart because it needed breaking so I could feel what was really there.

I am so grateful for those who are able to forgive my shortcomings and give me a chance to be a new person today. I am thinking about something I read about Gloria Anzaldúa, that mystical writer and activist and poet and healer, that she was both committed to community and wary of community. Any time you point to this or that as community and try to alcanzala y agarrarla it is bound to disappoint; collectively there is always this or that part of you that does not belong. Any time I conflate a group of gathered people with community and hold them bound to my expectations and ideals of what a community is and should be I am bound to be disappointed. Community is something that I create from the ground up in every interaction with everyone I encounter. Perhaps community is a communion with the light within us, the light that will never steer us wrong.

Maybe I had never been exiled before and needed to somehow feel what that felt like in order to find true belonging. I cease to be the person I before, my ego defenses break down, and what I am left with is knowing that my heart is good, that I care more than I can ever say, and I don’t know if anyone knows that. As bad as I am there is good in there somewhere. I am not trying to get anything for myself. I just want to love and be loved. It is strange that I was never lovingly taken aside and told, you are hurting me, never even reprimanded. One did tell me my words were making them uncomfortable. I do not know if anybody I may have hurt knows I didn’t mean to hurt them. I am not the same person I was five minutes ago or two years ago, as I just wrote in an email, and I am grateful for anyone who sees me as I am now and does not conflate me with my past mistakes however big they might be. I do not want to rely on others thinking well of me, though, and I know, somehow, there are people out there who really do not like me. It is hard to pick the wheat from the chaff, to know who might still be here, but it was really nice recently to hear from an old friend from high school who watched one of my videos and said it was so good to hear my voice. It was so healing. I think she must have seen me at a tome when I was concerned that everyone was thinking such horrible things about me, and it was like in my first relationship, where I knew I messed up, but I could not admit that to myself and would not give myself permission to turn ober a new leaf. I kept acting the old, outworn ways to defend myself, to defend my sensitivity, and my heart.

I remind myself that it is never too late to be a different person than I was before; my heart hurt so freaking much in ways I cannot begin to fathom, and I was so fragmented. Now I don’t know what I am and that is okay. When you have made a point to prove to everyone how immature you can be, you can kind of feel like a fraud when you get over that, and let your light shine through. Those who hate me, I think, though they may have good reason, for the most part never knew me at all. They see what I have chosen to show them and it is so hard to choose to reveal something else, something more tender, something more real. I am becoming. I do not know what. Perhaps, like the Velveteen Rabbit I am becoming more real…