don't speak, don't speak...

It’s recently come to me that not speaking about my life might be a good idea. Of course, being a writer of a blog makes this a little tricky but...

I’ve always enjoyed sharing my inner life. There is distance between “me” and the stories I tell so they don’t seem so “personal” to me. It feels almost as if I’m telling a story that happened to someone else. I see events in life as just stuff that happens and the more interesting the stuff, the more interesting the life. In the moment, I might cry and be upset but there is always a part of me that knows this too shall pass.

It hasn’t always been this way. Not as solid as I just described it. I spent my twenties and most of my thirties kicking and screaming unable to reach the marrow of life I so desired. I felt alone but on the fringes of all this I felt my past lives or other lives like whispers. I knew this life I was currently living was fleeting so I savored it. I followed my heart even though it would lead me astray. I always found my way home.

It reminds me of a quote from Sexing the Cherry by Jeannette Winterson, “The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single, and that our one existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end. When we say ‘I have been here before,’ perhaps we mean, ‘I am here now,’ but in another life, another time, doing something else. Our lives could be stacked together like plates on a waiter’s hand. Only the top one is showing, but the rest are there and by mistake we discover them.”

I don’t hold dearly to the events of life. I drink them in, devouring them, loving the ugly along with the pretty, looking for the cracks where truth is found behind the masks. I am not like anyone else and hearing opinions of how I live my life, no longer serves me. This is the shift.