Without Fear

Sometimes you have an epiphany in the middle of a grand, life-changing moment.  This has happened to me before - when my children were born, when I got married, when I got my fist tattoo.

This is not one of those epiphanies, though.  This one came to me over the brim of my coffee cup as I was noshing on a lemon-zucchini muffin with raisins in it and feeding small bites to the baby.

So far, my Year Without Fear has had mixed results.  I have been bolder in making grand changes in my life, the changes I have been wanting to make but was waiting on "someday" to start.  I have been less bold in making changes I know I should make but don't really want to. (Hello, diet and exercise, you dirty, dirty words.)  I started a container garden (only moderately successful), I switched to cloth diapers (VERY successful) and I joined a CSA (Holy Freaking Successful and Hi Farmer Billy! You're adorable!).  I've been cooking healthier meals for my family, eating nourishing foods like Beets, and doing my best to slay the dragons of depression and anxiety in my head.

In one aspect, however, I have not yet begun to fight.  I don't know if I have ever mentioned before (oh, maybe once or twice or eleventy-billion times) that I have trust issues.  Very few people get past the outer rim into the stratosphere of my inner emotions, let alone down to the hot-molten core.  

When this journal-of-sorts changed from a simple chronicling of my daily life into an outlet to share myself, it was freeing and terrifying all at the same time.  When family and friends found it and began to check in on me with regularity, it was just terrifying.  Over the years since, I find I have slowly begun to lock back up the vault that had begun to open here.

I never thought of myself as a closed person.  I've begun to see how much I have become that way, though.  I should have read the signs sooner; I should have seen a red flag when I went through postpartum depression and nobody but my husband had any idea, or had the first clue how bad it really was.  I'm realizing that I can't expect people to know how I feel if I don't share it.

And so it is that the next step in this continuing journey of self is this: I choose to reopen the vault.

To some family and friends, this means you are going to be allowed to see parts of my heart I have never revealed to you before.  You may not like everything you see.  I have spent my entire life wanting to be a writer while yet shutting down any creative expression that revealed too honest a part of me.

To the rest of you - my intrepid fellow-explorers, my friends at All Mediocre, and the rest of my Internet Peeps - after being with me as long as you have, I know you'll be the first to say "it's about time" and then embrace whatever is to come.  Because you have always done that for me.  Because even when we disagree, you embody the live-and-let-live philosophy I began to learn about in the wilds of Northern California.  (It tends to happen when you live near Berkeley for any amount of time.  Maybe not IN Berkeley, but I hear they put something in the water there.)

ANYwho, the can of worms is being opened.  It's time to practice what I preach.  It's time to let the monkey out of the bag. You know, so-to-speak.  

No more hiding.