I mentioned a few weeks ago in my  Sunday gratitude post that I would follow up on the fear I had related to sharing my story.  It’s funny because I have some trepidation about even sharing the reasons why I’m afraid.  So much of this information I have held incredibly close to my chest for years—I can say that in some of these cases there is NO ONE else who knows about what happened or it is only one or two people.  Part of me feels like people won’t believe some of it.  Is it real if there was no one else around for it?  But I understand that is about people pleasing.  I don’t need to be concerned that my history is real enough for people to believe it happened.  I worried about reconciling my version of events with other people’s.  Will people challenge the parts they do know?  On the ego level, it’s entirely about what people will think of these stories.  I know some of the stories I share are absolutely going to shatter any “image” I may have had.  Not necessarily my reputation, but certainly the idea people had of me.  I don’t know why I want to protect such a fragile-constructed idea anyway.  It’s been so much effort to maintain it for as long as I have and it’s a relief to let it go.  Maybe the point is to shatter the idea of what people had about me.  We can only get to the truth of who we are if we share the truth of who we are—and that is part of the journey of life.

This process has been incredibly cathartic but the healing journey isn’t linear.  There are so many facets to the human condition and I really needed to evaluate the value in sharing the stories.  What good comes from telling the truth?  Will anyone be hurt by them?  We need to reconcile ego and spirit and find the balance in what serves—and make sure what we do serves a purpose.  In the process of sharing, I’ve learned that there comes a point where you can’t worry about the impact on other people.  In order to serve our purpose, we need to share what happened. I never wanted to justify who I was through telling every dirty detail but I did such a good job of portraying myself in a certain light that people stopped seeing me in any other way.  I blended so well they thought I was vanilla and they doubted my capability and capacity for nearly everything.  The weight of being who we are not becomes too much to take.  Working through some of these stories has helped me identify exactly where things went sideways or where my habits developed.  Some of it has sent me spinning back in time.  Regardless, getting these events out of my head has helped me gain perspective on what needs to stay where it was and how I can move forward with new resolve.

 At the end of the day I decided that telling this story is necessary and will bring more good than harm.  I needed it for my mental health as well as my soul and the more I wrote about everything, the better I felt—and the clearer the message I’m sharing became.  The ironic thing is, the night I started having panic attacks thinking about the “consequences” of sharing these stories, I had a dream that brought me some comfort.  It wasn’t a hugely profound dream, but it felt incredibly symbolic.  I dreamt about my grandparents, 3 out of 4 of them.  In general grandparents are a symbol of protection in dreams—I’ve never dreamt about all of my grandparents in one dream before.  It really felt like they were making their presence known for me and that they were together collectively to support me.  It felt like they were saying I would be protected in sharing this story.  There was a part of the dream where we were surrounded by leaks in this basement and based on the context it felt like they were saying so much of what I have to talk about was already showing at the seams, leaking out so it’s time to just pull off the band-aid and let it all out.  I know that may seem far fetched, but it was enough to bolster my courage.  If I want to talk about authenticity, then I need to be authentic.  I hope we can all be that free.