I feel almost as though I have been keeping something from you.

So much has changed about me– about my writing since I moved my work from Myspace to my “own professional blog.” I have been in somewhat of a hibernation while I’ve been trying to figure out my new roles, and much of it has translated into a loss of passion for my writing. Not that it was ever Gone, really, but that I have been withholding, for one reason or another. I used to use my writing as a form of therapy– a form of pouring my heart out to you… and it has become something different. Something that was less biting, less intimate… and for that, I am truly sorry.

I became cautious… and aware of the infinite capacity I have to rule the writing world of internet… my reader base changed… and I was afraid of saying things that could be hurtful to past friendships that I believed at the time were salvageable. Who I am as a person has changed and grown… and much of this time has been spent trying to figure that all out.

I was thinking, though. And I was doing a whole lot of soul searching… purging the secrets from my past, creating new secrets to share with you all.

Please don’t be mad… I had good reasons to keep myself from you. I had good reasons, and while they were good for the time, I believe I’ve worked all those reasons out.

So it begins.

Recently I have been on a mission to work through my greatest fears. I have been trying to be as honest with myself as is possible. It’s an intricate balance, though, because sometimes you want to change the things you’re being honest about, and in doing so, it’s terribly un-helpful to go about announcing them to the world. Much of the Law of Attraction has to do with saying what you want and ignoring what you don’t want. In the length of my self-reflection, I have come to understand it that much more clearly. You cannot simply ignore your faults in order to eliminate them. Sometimes you have to address them and work through them in order to resolve them. There is nothing to ignore if it’s resolved.

Fears. Fear is the opposite of love. I love love, but I am so very afraid sometimes. I fear the most neurotic things one can think of… I obsess over them, and in turn it leads me into a pit of mass anxiety and sometimes panic. Obsessing is my nature. I have fought against the obsessive streams for so long that I had even convinced myself that I wasn’t obsessive. I had fought the anxiety so much that I had convinced everyone, especially myself, that I wasn’t feeling stress. Instead of turning off those stress reactions, I was internalizing them… therefore making my body hurt, which in turn causes me to stress about my body, and more accurately, my health.

I’ve been afraid of death for as long as I can remember. I have never been reckless, and I err on the side of caution for no other reason than that I’m fearful of the consequences. Of course, this is a physical reality and has little to do with my moral behavior and everything to do with my mortality. I am not a law abiding citizen because I am afraid, I am law abiding because I feel that there are laws for a reason. I have put much faith into our justice system (wrongfully so, I suppose), because I have never been in a category of people who tends to get discriminated against when it comes to law. It is a different form of caution that I’m speaking of here. I’m cautious when it comes to my body and my health. I’m convinced I will die young. It’s irrational, as irrational as my fear of flying off the face of the earth– and one certainly cannot lead a fulfilling life if their most intimate fear is to die. It’s an inevitability, and while I wouldn’t hope to die young, if I did, I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be a whole helluva a lot I could do to change that. Even so, I am cautious.

In a constant state of underlying fear, it becomes difficult to be honest with myself. It becomes difficult to thrive because in the back of my mind there’s always a little voice that is telling me to be careful. As much as I preach that with great risk comes great rewards, I have been unwilling to compromise myself.

I acknowledge that these fears are unreasonable. And I have come to realize that in order to “get over” them, I have to use them to the best of my abilities– making my flaws become inherently good things– advantages, so to speak. Of course, I will have an unending supply of empathy when one day I treat a patient for anxiety… assuming I figure out how to work through it before I actually get there!

In denying myself the expression of fear, I have internalized a great deal of stress. It has manifested itself within me in pain and nervous energy. It has distracted me, and when I am aware of “how I feel,” I can become riddled with panic– because it only feeds the cycle of fear.

I believe that much of my reasons for being able to address this Now instead of Before comes from the time I’ve taken to reflect and work on understanding my emotions. Before I had so many changes– I had so much uncertainty, and it just wasn’t a safe place (yet) to express it. Now, however, I believe that I am ready. I’m ready and able, and I’m not entirely sure how I got from Before to Now, but I’m here, and excited to pour it all out. In expressing it, I am acknowledging it. In expressing it, I am also giving energy to it– but my hopes are that it works towards healing rather than in manifesting more fear.

In addition to time, I have had the gift of sobriety. Looking back, I wouldn’t consider myself as having been an un-sober person, but at the same time, there is a dramatic contrast between occasionally partaking to rarely partaking. There has been a shift in my awareness, and I have gained exceptional clarity. Not to say that I still don’t partake now and then, but now I am so lucid that even a rare occasion to partake floors me. It disables me. I can’t say I don’t like feeling high, but at the same time, I certainly enjoy sobriety better, more. It puts ME back in the driver’s seat, and it allows me to account for every emotion, every experience, without something to cloud my perspective.

Time, sobriety, and comfortability. I have always considered myself to be my own person. I have never been one to submit to peer pressure. At the same time, I was in a constant state of conformation in the hopes that the ones I loved would love me as fully and as completely as I loved them. I would adjust my behaviors so that every facet you ever saw of me would be sublime. I collected my “admirers” yet had no idea who I was when I acted solely based upon what I wanted.

I am a giver, yes. I am one who will accommodate as much as I have available within me. I am extremely patient and comfortable allowing my beloveds to just be. That is why people tell me things… I am an open forum, and can listen and love without judgment. The only person who wasn’t privy to the benefit of the doubt was myself. I was my own worst critic. It began with my childhood– my eating disorders, my willingness to please… it carried on as a manifestation of my fear of abandonment, created by so many family dynamics in my experience that I would conform to whomever’s standards as would accept me.

In the time I’ve had to think about these things, I have come to place to accept that I’m utterly embraced by someone who expects nothing from me but to be my own person. In that sort of comfortable position, I have given my own self permission to expand and explore my inner being. I have been able to discover my spirituality. I have been able to learn more about me in the last few months than I had in my entire lifetime– and I’ve had the opportunity to be honest with myself, wholly.

In doing so, I have digested myself.

Make no mistake, I fully realize that even once I work through this discovery, I will continue to have a lifetime of learning before me. Nothing is more intimidating than knowing that as much as I’ve learned about myself, I still have much to discover. When I began identifying who I AM, I saw that possibly my greatest Fault is my obsessive fears. This is intimidating because not only is the acknowledgment going to force me to address and heal those wounds, but also because if this is only the first major thing I have realized, then who knows how much more difficult my following Faults may be to swallow.

It’s a great responsibility to choose to be emotionally healthy. It’s so much easier to blame… to ignore… to deny.

Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of continuing to find ways to improve my wellness, though, I feel calm. I’m going to take a positive perspective (my specialty) about it, and recognize that it is within my capacity to learn these great life lessons. I’m also somewhat relieved to recognize that if these are the life lessons I’m addressing in this lifetime, then perhaps I’m much further along the karmic road than one (I) would guess. At least this go ’round I’m learning about mental wellness instead of something like Thou Shalt Not Kill, right?

This all being said, I feel like I am ready to put forth the effort necessary to conquer the things about me that I know aren’t right… and continue to seek out the things I must work on. It is my goal now to decipher the best ways of handling my fears, and find a way that makes these things work for me. It’s another part of the process of becoming comfortable in my own skin.

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