This new person who is emerging as I come out of my years of isolation and fear of even leaving the house…she’s embarrassing.  She speaks.  Loudly.

She speaks a lot; at times inappropriately.  She has a lot to say…

and I cannot shut her up.

I was not in the world, and I didn’t know how to be any more… I wished to re-enter life,

and so I set out on a painful quest to re-awaken, to step outside of my door. Literally: I had been housebound for a long, long time – and only a few people knew that. I hid it. I flew places for jobs, then went back into my cave, and no one knew I was in hiding, solitude, and self-imposed silence for years.

Now, there is this person bursting out.  She is who I was up to about 3rd grade; she is who I was when I was totally secure…she is back, and she’s got a hell of a lot to say.

I find myself wishing she’d shut up, or learn to edit, and I writhe in embarrassment. I often apologize for the things she says and does.

But my spirit is large; she’s huge in fact, and it’s painful to the point where I have a well of tears needing to be shed if I try to silence her, stifle her, push her back into her tiny world.

Genies don’t go BACK into bottles…. they simply don’t.

So, I have to live with the discomfort of the new person I am becoming – the person I always was, before I silenced myself for over thirty years. before I made my world even smaller after a series of traumas, and hid in my home for about three years.

Three. Years. never leaving the house for months at a time. Living in books.

I honor her today: this noisy girl who feels misunderstood, who has a lot to say, who is bursting with the joy of living. I honor her, and I vow to her that I will stop apologizing for her…I will stop shaming her, and I will stop silencing her voice.  This gentle, shy, soft spirit will learn to live with the warrior-court-jester she is becoming externally.  It is deeply uncomfortable. It hurts when people tell me how they see me – bold, loud, owning a room when I walk in, bursting, courageous, all the words that were deeply shameful things to me when I was growing up. Hearing how others see me makes me want to go back into that cave, hide, and cry. “That is not who I am,”  I want to say, “That is not my heart,”  … and I say nothing…because I am confused. That *is* who I am… I just need to learn to believe in her.
Yet when I was at drama school, it was “you walk into a room and disappear, Rebecca.”  I never forgot that one. I was an invisible person.
Now, this weekend,  “You are huge. You walk into a room and you own the room. you light it up.”
I don’t know what to do with that. I feel exposed, raw, …and wrong. I feel unravelled … there is so much ME pouring over the edges of the small container I used to confine my voice and spirit in…

It hurts. so much.

I am finding that when you allow yourself space, when you have a strong opinion and voice in the world, people can overlook your heart a lot. They maybe don’t want to take the time to learn who you really are. I have always been gentle, and overly sensitive – it’s a deeply painful thing when that kind of heart is housed with a fighting, curious, vocal and bold spirit. I do not know how to juggle these things. not yet, but I will. I will find a way to navigate my life expression in this world…to embody it fully and without apology. some day, I will.

Let her speak. Let others call me loud or brazen or egotistical : they simply do not understand. They have not walked my road. It is okay, and I am beautiful just the way I am, overflowing with words and thoughts and the joy of living. Some will see it, some will not,

and it is all a blessing.