Blog entry for:

of who i am, right or wrong, is what the past sixteen months has been all about. learning to live out form under the weight of the lie that defined me for so long, is hardly a comfortable place to be. after all, one would think that after sixty-five years of presence on this world, i “should” know who the fVck i am. one of the things i like most about my trips to Montana, is that for the entire time i am there, i am free to be just me. i have no obligations to be dutiful, nor is there a whole lot of history about what i did and what was done to me. in those days with my family, i GET to be honest and talk about more than just the weather, although we do talk about the weather as well.
thinking about how deep my character defects go, as well as seeing them as the lenses through which i view the world, i do comprehend how i got to where i am today. each and every character defect was developed to protect any of the so-called weak spots in my make-up. i learned early on that not communicating was a much safer route to follow, than being who i was. cynicism protected me from “high hopes” and the echoes of that FEAR still pervades my life today. if i expect the worse to happen, i will be pleased when things turn out for the better, rather than disappointed when they do not. what i am coming to see, is that through living a program, i no longer require that protection and as a result, i can certainly be a whole lot less cynical and a bit more hopeful. i could go on and on, but i am certain that one gets where i am going with this analysis.
it is odd that i feel more at ease with the family members i see once a year and make an effort to connect with, each and every time i am in their neck of the woods. there were certainly times over the weekend when i wanted to pull back, walk back to my room and just isolate for a few hours. when i consider what was going on, i can see that i was having “feelings” and my instant reaction to having feelings is to run away and hide, so no one sees me. i stayed with my family and they got to see me being vulnerable and that sort of intimacy is not comfortable for me, and yet i survived, one more to feel yet another day. i am a better person because i walked through situations that once stymied me, regardless of my apprehensions and as i wrap this up, i am going to head out to work with the understanding that just for today, being who i am is better than the shell of the person i once was comfortable projecting.

∞ DT ∞