How I survived myself

  There was a time when I could fly. I would begin by walking, slowly at first, and then I would pick up momentum as I neared the edge of the hill on our street and my feet would lift off the pavement, into the invisible air and then higher, and higher.  The wind would pick me up and I would soar above my neighbourhood, above the earth. I would dip down, skimming the rooftops and then I would fly back up again, using my arms to part the air as I climbed. I would fly at night, and in the sunshine, and in the rain. There were days I ventured passed the familiar and would discover river valleys and mountains and city streets. When I grew tired, I would land as gentle as a butterfly, back on solid ground.

  I had many tell me I must have been dreaming, but I didn’t believe that could be true. If it were just a dream why could I remember it so clearly? Why could I taste the wind on my tongue, hear it singing in my ears, feel it as it coursed through my bones and made my heart beat fast. If it wasn’t real, why did I know what it was to feel so light, so peaceful, so free?  

  Around five years old I decided to prove it. Our home had a steep set of stairs connecting upstairs to the main level. I was going to take off and then proceed to fly around my house doing aerial acrobatics and impressing all the naysayers with my invisible wings. I stood at the top, took a deep breath, lifted off, flew for a dazzling moment and then came crashing down and broke my mother’s beautiful ceramic urn that was holding umbrellas at the bottom of the staircase.  I remember being impressed that my head was hard enough to break a big clay pot without needing any stitches.

  I also remember deciding never again to prove to anyone that I could fly.

  There was a time when I believed that anything was possible. When I believed in faeries, and magic, and wishing wells, and in dreaming dreams bigger than the sky. When I knew I could just fly up there and catch them like a falling star in the night.

  Tonight I want to believe in all those things again. I want to collect the wings I left gathering dust in the basement, brush them off and fly. I will go even further this time. I will seek out the magic and the beauty in all the corners of the wide world. I will cross oceans, sail with the sun as it rises and falls, and I will embrace the universe and all my dreams with my peaceful heart.

  When I am hungry, I eat. How basic. How crude. How easy would it be if all we hungered for was food? If I could give the man on the corner an apple and he’d be satisfied? If I could give a hungry child some bread to stop the pain? If I knew what to feed myself to keep me full for weeks? But we need so much more to nourish our starving souls. We need so much more to feed our hungry hearts.

  Sometimes, we are hungry for music. For community. For acceptance. For love. For someone to stand up and say “you matter to me.” A couple of weeks ago I attended a concert put on by the Calgary Drop- In Centre. I have spent time in this building, gotten to know some of the clients, employees, and volunteers. It is not an easy place to spend time. It is a busy place. It’s loud, it’s dirty, the smell takes some getting used to. It is a world unlike the one I know. But the people are the same as you and me. They are hungry just like you and me.

  Sometimes we feed our hunger the only way we know how. We fill the void with alcohol and crack cocaine, with chocolate and sex. Sometimes we feed it with anger, sometimes sadness, sometimes regret. Food can be a dangerous thing.

  But sometimes we are served a meal, or better yet, we cook our own, that makes Canada’s food guide look like deep-fried awful. This was the feast I attended on a Tuesday night in June. This was no fast food production. It took time and a lot of hard work. It took patience, plane tickets, media calls, last minute panic, and uncertainty. It took the desire of artists and people in the Calgary community to make a difference, and it took the courage of some unsung voices to stand up and say “I am ready to be heard”. The concert was centered around the song “Stand by Me” by Ben E. King. It is a song that has great meaning to a place whose many residents have been left standing on their own. At one point in the evening all the musicians, who included the never before heard and the heard a lot, all joined together on stage to sing with Ben E. King himself. They shared the song with eachother, and as the lyrics rose up to the sky and reached out across the sea of people there to witness, we began to stand up one by one, until the whole room was on it’s feet.  

 To describe it here would be like trying to tell you what mint chocolate chip ice cream tastes like; I could say it’s cold, it’s minty, and chocolatey too, but… you’d have to taste it for yourself to really know. So I will say that it was mouth wateringly delicious. And yet, I left hungry for more. For more music, more understanding, more acceptance, more dancing. For freedom, love, kindness, creation. Hungry for change, for peace, for laughter. For a world where our starving hearts are full of what we are really hungry for.

 The greatest lesson I have ever learned is from my mother.

 She taught me a course on forgiveness. A curriculum of love.

 When I was sixteen years old my mother disappeared. She had been in a relationship with a man who we had come to learn was not the knight in shining armour he said he was. For years he managed to keep his lies a secret from us all. We were but puppets dancing to the manipulations of the strings he controlled.  Over time, his grip loosened on my sister, on myself and others and we began to see the truth. But he would not let go of my mother. After months of desperately trying to set her free from this relationship, she vanished into thin air.

 There was no goodbye letter. No phone call. Nothing. She was just gone.

 Her disappearance was the secret I carried with me as I struggled to balance math, and rehearsals, and everything else that comes along with being sixteen. It was not something I was allowed to talk about in my father’s home, so I began searching for the answers in my mind.  I waited for the phone call saying that they had found her body, murdered by the man whose lies she had loved, but it did not come. If she was not dead, the alternative was worse. If she was not dead, she had left on her own accord. She had abandoned us. My sister and I, the little girls she had said she loved more than all the stars in the sky, and all the grains of sand, but not more than a man in a red Ferrari driving her straight into his hell. If she was not dead then all that love had been a lie.

 Months past, though it felt like years, and finally one day in late may I came home to a message on my answering machine. “It’s me. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

 It has been six years since that phone call. Six years spent learning to forgive.

 I would be lying if I said forgiveness came easy. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t so angry I couldn’t breathe. I would be lying if I said the road to forgiveness wasn’t filled with pain. But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t also filled with love.

 On my seventeenth birthday, just weeks after that first phone call my mother sent me these words;

  …At times, I have been lost, scared, frightened of the force of that love and in my fear I have not always managed to be the “perfect mother”, the “perfect wife”, the “perfect person”. Though I have always managed to be perfectly me, in all my beauty and pain. And, my love has always been and always will be perfectly alive. It may not always seem the perfect gift to you. It may at times feel like a burden and rather than the blessing I send it as, possibly even a curse. But my love for you can never end for it is infinite.
 
Remember when you were young how I would tell you “I love you more than all the blades of grass that will ever grow. More than all the drops of rain that will ever fall. More than all the grains of sand that will ever be. And so much more”? It is true. There never will be a time when my love for you does not flow. There is nothing you or anyone else can say, do or believe that could destroy my love for you and for your sister. For love is perfect, love is limitless and love can never die, for we are Love. It is the gift of our lives that never ends.

 I wanted to believe it, but I needed answers. Why had she let this happen? How could she have done this to us? What kind of mother was she? Would she do it again? I told myself when I had all the answers, a map of what went wrong, I would forgive her. But sometimes the answers aren’t good enough. Sometimes answers don’t make it all make sense.

 Having an answer doesn’t magically transform pain into trust. My pain was my protector. It was my shield and my sword. If I hold on to this anger you cannot hurt me again. In the many months following my mother’s return to her own life and ours I would test her. I would hurl my anger at her-blades of words aimed at the places where I knew it would hurt. I waited for her to leave again. What I didn’t know is that love does not leave. It does not die.

 And in forgiving, I set myself free.

 The road to forgiveness was not easy. It took patience and time. But mostly it took love. And in the end, forgiveness was a choice. A yes or a no. I forgive you, or I don’t. There are no strings attached. No restrictions, no fine print. Forgiveness is a river, the water can’t go back. Only forwards, over the waterfall, straight into love.

 I wonder sometimes what might have happened if my mother did not come back. What if his grip had killed her?  Every way I look at it, I know love would still have been the answer. It is the gift she gave us that has no end. Maybe I would have travelled on the river longer, maybe I’d still be on the journey to forgiveness, but I believe, without a doubt that it’s where I would end up.

 That is the teaching of my mother.  A lesson in love.

 Evey Tuesday for the past 8 months I have spent the better part of the day with a group of actors and councillors facilitating an after school acting program for junior high students in at risk neighbourhoods. The program is finished for this year, and my Tuesday feels incomplete. 

  This program has been my first real foray into the world of forum theatre. A form of theatre created (or discovered) in the 1970s by Augusto Boal. It is an interactive session in which the spectators become actors and can change the course of action of the characters who are facing real life challenges. The intention is to start a sort of theatrical debate in which experiences and ideas are shared in order to bring about a sense of solidarity, understanding, and empowerment. 

  For  the purposes of our program it is also a form of therapy and of prevention. We are dealing with kids being raised in lower income neighbourhoods, which though not inclusively or exclusively, puts them at risk for certain behaviours and problems like drug use, abuse, crime, neglect, and the list goes on. The hope of our program is that by having the kids “act out” these different scenarios in a safe environment, it will help to moderate the fight or flight response so that they are better prepared to make wise, empowered decisions when they face these issues in real life.

  The course of these last months has been challenging, hair raising, rewarding, and eye opening. We have discussed tough issues, played games, gotten creative, and had a wild time doing it. On our last day in our closing circle one boy put up his hand and said, “Thank you for being here. I didnt think I’d like it but I had fun and I’ve learnt I’m not alone.” 

  If that is what he learnt, here is what I have learnt; That I am blessed. I am blessed with people in my life who support me and lift me up. With a father who gave me the gift of knowledge and information, nature, laughter, and bed time stories. With a mother who instilled creativity and compassion, and the sense that I can do anything. Parents who have given me the gift of worth. A sister who shares with me her spirit, her ingenuity, and her friendship. A family of blood and a family of choice who share their kindness, adventures, and hearts in every way they can. I have been blessed with a beautiful childhood filled with barbies, and Disneyland, and sleepovers and love. But not every child is so blessed as that.

  Some of the teens I met this year were not easy to like. They had foul mouths, didnt follow directions, fought, came to session stoned, you name it. For some of them, this was the last place they wanted to be and they had no problem letting us know. Some of them stopped coming, some went to jail, some went to rehab, some were 13 years old and had given up hope. Some of them stayed. Not always easy to like, but hard not to love. 

  As their stories came out, a few words at a time over the course of months, I was left speechless. Wordless. If I write down my outrage, my sadness, it makes their stories true.

  Not every child is so blessed as I. Some have parents who hit them, who hurt them, exploit them, who leave them and dont come back. Some have parents who drink, use, overdose, and get locked up. Some children have parents who call them slut, idiot, fag, and worthless. Some children have a mom called the TV. Some kids dont get to go to disneyland, or have sleepovers, or learn about Mozart, or mountains, or love. And I would guess that some of these children have parents who never got the gift of worth too.

  And all the the love and all the theatre in the world cant change their pasts, but I have hope, that what we are doing today will bless their futures.

  Once upon a time there was a little girl who looked in the mirror and through the glass she would see a vision of a beautiful princess. A young girl just like her with the same fair hair and soft complexion as she had. And the same smile and the very same twinkle in her eye. And as the little girl would begin to dance the little princess too would follow suit. They would twirl in unison as they moved to the rythym of the song in thier heart.  When thier pink skirts swirled like a carousel around their knees they would collapse in piles of laughter. The kind of laughter that cant help but escape, but then, there was nothing stopping them anyway. A lifetime of possibility stretched out before them as they would skip and leap across the floor and proclaim with the kind of enthusiasm only princesses and little girls can “I am beautiful”. And it was the truth.

  The little girl is not so little anymore. She is a teenager now. She nolonger see’s the vision of the princess in the mirror. She is staring instead at a girl just as plain as she is. With the same mousy hair and pale skin and the same frown and the twinkle is gone from her eyes. And the girl doesn’t dance anymore. She would look silly in front of her new friends. And she certainly isnt wearing a pink skirt. She wears torn up jeans and sneakers and you certainly wont catch her twirling. And she catches herself when she feels the laughter trying to escape.

 And I look at her and wonder what happened in the 7 years since I saw her last. Why can she nolonger see the beautiful princess staring back at her from the looking glass?

  I want to tell her that I can still see her. That she is just at as beautiful as she was back once upon a time. I want to erase the years that have stolen the truth away. I say goodbye as the girls head out of the workshop I have just finished teaching. The room is empty now. I take a breath and as I turn to leave I catch a glimpse of a woman in the mirror with hair like night and skin the colour of milk  and I make a note to book a tan and a hair cut and I wonder what happened to the princess I once saw looking back at me. We used to dance too. We used to believe that we could do anything, be anything. We used to know that we were beautiful. And for a moment I am six again. I do not know that I will soon believe that I need to be thinner, taller, blonder, smarter. I look at the little girl in the mirror. She stares back at me with the same smile I have and the same twinkle in her eye. “You are still beautiful” she whispers. And I believe her because princesses dont lie.

Free adj. 1 not captive, confined, or restricted; 2 not busy or taken up; not in use; not prevented from doing something; 3 not subject to something; without. 4 costing nothing. 5 giving or spending without restraint. Free syn. Available, independent, self-governing, at liberty, at large, unfettered. As a verb; 1 set free. In other words; to release, let go, liberate, turn loose, untie, unleash; rescue, extricate.

  The dictionary does not describe the way freedom sounds, or tastes, or smells, or looks like. It does not say that freedom exists in many forms. Freedom of the body, the soul, the mind. A free man, a free nation, a free world. It does not say that free is, like the man I met on the train the other day described, not having to worry about being killed by the days end. He had grown up during a civil war in South America and to him, the word Canada is a fancy way of saying  free.  It doesnt talk about God, or society, or metabolics, or DNA, or geneology. It doesnt talk about the limiting influences in individual lives, or what works against it. It also does not say that freedom is a place, a dream, an idea, a risk, a choice. Nor does it carry instructions on how to become free, how to release, let go, or how to unleash.

 Because a definition (and I got this from the dictionary too) is an outline. It is not the skin, the bones, the mind, the heart, the soul. Which means just like my body is unlike any other, so too is my definition.

 Free a place New Zealand. Free an animal The dolphin. Free a feeling bliss. Free smells like the sea. Tastes like salt on my tongue. Feels like cold ocean water invading our tiny boat and soaking my body. Looks like miles of open water and then the sun catching on something sleek and shiny in the crest of a wave that wasnt visible before. Free sounds like my voice singing to the silver creatures dancing just below the waves, calling them over to come and play.

  The other night over pear gorgonzola pizza and pinot grigio at our favourite little restaurant, my mother asks me this question; when was the last time you remember being free?  I am in Pahia. It is not the best day for swimming with dolphins. The sky is overcast, there is a wind on shore that will only grow stronger on open water. But it is our last day in this sleepy seaside town on the  North Island, so I go anyway. It is my second day on the boat. My friend Victoria and I had gone yesterday. We had seen the dolphins. We had held our breath in delight as they breached, and flipped, and then all too quickly swam farther out beyond the line of the horizon.  Today my travelling companions stay on the mainland. My nature generally to go where they go, I make the decision to go it alone. I want to know I exhausted every chance I had to swim with them, whether a close encounter were to occur or not.

  So I board the little yellow boat and greet Billy and Grace, the same captain and skipper I had met the previous morning. “You may not get the chance  today.” they caution, “Its not looking great out there”. If the currents are dangerous or there is a calf in the pod legally we cannot enter the water. But I am aware of this. I smile, “Its worth the shot”.

  I do not remember how long we are darting between islands before we spot them. Ahead of us at first, then all of a sudden there are dark shadows gliding just below the surface of the water, right below where I am perched at the front of the boat. “‘There’s a calf in this pod” Billy says, “we wont be going in”. But he directs me to lie face down on the bow,  hold on to the bars, and lean out so that I am hanging over the front. I imagine I am like the sculpted mermaids that adorn ancient vessels. “They respond to voices” Grace yells to me. So I start to call to them. I slap the water with my free hand, I coo, I sing, I laugh. I dont care how ridiculous I look. I am unfettered and at large. The bow dips and my upper body is in the water and my hair is soaked, and there is sea water filling my mouth, and there is a dolphin thisclose, staring directly at me, and it is smiling, and we look at eachother and in its eyes I see everything that I want to be.  And I am no longer in the boat, or even in my own body; I am in the water and I am a dolphin and I am playing in the waves. I am wild, and smiling. I am at peace, and I am free.

  “And where does this moment exist now?”  My mother inquires as only a mother can. And I realize that it is written in my skin, my bones, my mind, my heart, my soul.

 There is a saying that goes something like, “If a tree falls in the woods and noone is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”  Can then it also be asked if a painter paints a picture and never shows it to anyone, is it really art? If a poet writes a poem and never shares it, is it poetry? If a singer sings, but only in the privacy of the shower, is that music? If a person lives their life with their truth, their gifts locked up inside of them and never opens the door or gives away the key is that really living?

  And what about the painter who doesnt even pick up the brush? The poet whose pen never touches the pad? The singer whose voice never reaches the air?

  What about me?

  When did I stop dancing? Stop singing? Stop writing? Stop acting? Stop painting? Stop laughing? Stop living?

   And what about when the tree? What happens when it falls and there are people around and the ground shakes, and the needles fly, and the bark breaks and it rattles and scares them?  Who is responsible for that? The tree? The wind? The people for getting in the way?

  Why did I stop dancing? stop singing? stop writing? Stop acting? Stop painting? Stop laughing? Stop living?

  Because I am afraid that I will fall and the ground will come at me fast and hard and cause my bark to break and peices of me will fly off and everyone will see the knotts and the scars and insects will make a home in my broken open heart.

  And because I am even more afraid that I will fall and there will be noone there to witness it, and I will not have made a sound.

My grandmother lives in a house on the ocean. It is a forest green home nestled amongst rocks and trees with steps built by my grandfather leading down to the beach below. It was a magical place to visit as children. A place filled with wild, raw adventure. My sister and I would marvel as we discovered pieces of this new world so different from our inner city playground. We watched in awe as transient orcas made their way across the straight, giggled as otters frolicked in the surf, and shrieked as crabs scurried to find shelter after we had upturned the rocks they’d been hiding beneath. We would delight as anemones shrank inward at the touch of our tiny fingers and held our breath as we tried to coax dear along the shore to sample the apples we held out for them in our tiny hands. Despite the warnings of my grandmother, we would jump across tide pools and balance like tightrope walkers along pieces of drift wood. We got our feet wet and our hands dirty and at night, curled up in our sleeping bags, we would drift off to the lullaby of waves crashing against the shore below.

  I miss this place. I have not visited in many tides. I miss seeing the world through my child’s eyes. I miss my grandmother also- who she was before I grew up and realized I do not know her at all. As a child she was just Grammie. I knew she gave wet sloppy kisses, sent a loonie on my birthday for each year I’d been alive, and said the words “God Damn It Alexis” when I threw tantrums. She was not the kind of grandmother who bakes cookies or tells you stories about when she was a girl, but the kind who tells you to wear an undershirt and makes you eat what’s on your plate; the kind that helps you clean up your room and lets you ride in the front seat of her convertible with the top down. I knew these things to be facts. I did not question the origin of her ways or long to know her soul.  I know her now like the ocean in some ways; Mysterious and uncompromising; vast and unpredictable; sometimes playful and sometimes dangerous; hard to navigate. She is like the ocean for I am drawn to her, love her, and am afraid she’ll drown me anyway.

  I see her clearer now; Nearing ninety, her body frail and small and failing her, her mind and tongue as sharp as ever.  She is still on her own, her husband in the ground for many years and the man she loves across the country. She has a cat to keep her company. She has a neighbor that looks up on her. She has the sound of the ocean around her, and her family’s voices, distant on the phone.  When I call to catch up I do not hear her lectures, I hear her loneliness. I do not hear her complaints about the cold, I hear her sadness. I hear a woman who has become an island. Or is this how it has always been?

  “Hello” her voice cracks as she answers. “Hi Grammie, it’s me.” She asks what’s new. I give her updates on the weather, my job. She tells me about the seal that’s been hanging around the rocks, how the cat is, how the surgery went. Sometimes she lectures me about what it is I should be doing and reminds me to stay out of trouble. I make a joke and we end the conversation by wrapping our arms around ourselves in the sign of a hug. We know we both do this because we make the sound of being squished.   

“Good bye Grammie, I miss you”

“I miss you too”

  And we hang up.

  The words I long to say, as silent still as the moon in the night sky.

  What does your heart say grandmother? What did you dream of when you were a girl? Who did you love? Who hurt you? What did you fight for? What did you give up? How did you get here? Who was your mother? Your father? Where did you come from? What were your greatest joys?  Your regrets? Your fears? Your triumphs? How do I reach you? What does it take? What do you know? What do you wish for? What makes your heart dance? What makes you cry? Who are you? I’m sorry that I don’t see you through my child’s eyes anymore. Can I please come in?  

  And if I could travel across the cables, across the water, across time, I would sit in her lap like I did as a child and I would whisper “I love you grammie. You are the wind whistling through the trees. You are the call of the loon, the wild colors of the setting sun. I’ve never told you this, but you are beautiful. And needed. And wanted. And loved.”

  My grandmother lives in a house on the ocean. It is a lonely place nestled amongst rocks and trees, with steps, built by my grandfather, that she can no longer travel down. There is a world down there that she cannot explore. Do her bones betray her, or is she afraid of the coming tide?

If I could lighten up a little I’d let myself sing as loudly as possible and I wouldn’t care if the neighbours heard. If I could lighten up a little I’d jump on the bed. I would move to Paris and dye my hair a rich shade of red. I would take deeper breaths, stay up all night, and read poetry to strangers. I would dance. Naked. In front of a mirror. And I’d laugh at the way my flesh jiggles. If I could lighten up a little I would take bubble baths, read more, and make decisions quickly without agonizing over the outcomes. I would breathe and forgive myself for making mistakes. I would cheer loudly at hockey games just for the hell of it. I would do cannonballs of the diving board. I’d paint with my feet and relish the goo sliding between my toes. I would do more work and less procrastinating. I would build sandcastles too close to the incoming tide. I would dress up in gowns and make fake Oscar speeches, I would sit inside grocery carts and have someone push me down the aisles, I would just get my license already. I would hug people instead of shaking their hand, kiss everyone on both cheeks, and when I laughed it would be from the depths of my joy. I would stop complaining about the weather and get dressed in the dark. I’d shake out my worries by shaking my soul.

  If I could lighten up a little maybe I wouldn’t be so scared. Maybe I could shake the blues with a strawberry milkshake. Maybe I would be able to take a breath without choking on my tears. Maybe I’d get over all the things I can’t do, haven’t done, don’t want to do or haven’t done right. Maybe I’d throw my hands up in the air and proclaim “How fascinating” before I had the chance to knock myself down. Maybe I would be less selfish, more selfless. Less fake, more real. Maybe I would surprise myself with how great I really am. Maybe I’d take less and give more.  Maybe I would have the courage to get closer to god. Maybe I would appreciate the moment and live from the heart. If I could lighten up a little, maybe I would help to light up the world.

  My fingers hesitate as they pose overtop the keys. They are standing guard. Waiting to recieve word to let it flow. After an extended hiatus my voice has suddenly returned. at dinner tonight after a long conversation enjoyed between bites of hazelnut and butternut squash pasta and sips of verdajo, the urge to press my fingers to the keyboard returned. Epiphanies will do that. Travel will do that. A short reprieve from the strain of the everyday will sometimes ignite a fire once left flickering in the darkest corners of the soul.

  I have been in Banff since yesterday. Enjoying great food, great wine, and a little bit of change that makes a great big difference. I cannot place the exact time or date, but for the past months I have felt that the light inside of me has been extinguished. I have been going through the motions of each day with little passion. I have felt like a bird with these beautiful wings all squished up in a very tiny cage. As if every part of me wants to expand, but is trapped for lack of a way out. I realized tonight that I have been enclosing myself in this little cage off and on for a period much longer than these past few months. I have been trapped in boxes of my own thinking for a lifetime.

  I have always been a little different. There is a picture of me in a ballet class somewhere around the age of four. All the girls are tall. Their blond hair is pinned back neatly in a bun. Thier tutus are regulation pink, their toes pointed and turned outward in perfect plies. I stand at they end of the row, my flyaway brown hair is adorned with a yellow headband. I wear an off pink leotard and a slip of a skirt. I  dont have the picture with me, but I am fairly certain one of my feet is pigeon toed and my right hip juts out to the side. I joke about the picture now and how my lack of uniformity is all the fault of my mother, but it hasnt ever really been a joke to me. I have desperately been seeking a place where I belong. I have found this place before, only to find later that the space is not big enough. I guess it is not in my nature to be small. So I start to take steps outside, only to find that when you start taking steps outside the box, you sometimes lose what is still inside. I did not realize that such is life. You have to risk some to gain some. I just believed that my place, my heart, my dreams were not worth risking anymore. I see now, that the person I have lost inside the cages I’ve designed is myself. I have become so small that I have created exactly what I have feared. There is no room for anyone in here.  The truth is, I was not meant to fit in. It is my biggest shame and the secret I have done my best to hide, But if I hide it any longer I will never fly. I dont fit in. I am different. I stand out.

  This truth has haunted me, taunted me, and threatened to keep me from my dreams. But I have spoken it out loud now. Written it down. “I dont fit in” cant hurt me anymore. Because I dont care. Not that knowing this makes it easy. It will be a fight. Everyday I will have to step out. Claim my inner four year old who didnt give a damn about wearing mickey mouse bodysuits to class, and sing my new anthem at the top of my lungs! I stand out suckas! I am talented and smart and sexy and worthy and if you gotta problem with that, it’s not mine!!

  And I am writing this down so that tommorrow, when it gets hard to claim my voice, when I want to listen to all the messages saying “get back in the box” I will be reminded that somewhere inside of me the truth fits.