Transition Blues: Learning to Swim in Half Cooked Soup!

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.  –Anais Nin-

Back to writing! I have been struggling with over exposure lately!   Every topic I want to write about seems to be tinted with something more personal than I feel the courage to share at the moment.  It feels like I have been floating in half cooked soup lately. 

Let me back track for a moment.  Late last week I decided to face this fear of being seen, hence my last post.  The decision took a long while in coming however once I did it, it’s like the other parts of me would rather I had not done that. It was easier to write as myself without putting my face or name to something.  I know how this works.  My mind does not like grappling with these new and unfamiliar feelings. It would rather that things stayed the same.  Now things don’t feel “perfect” and I notice that a certain “censor” has moved in to keep me company when I write. She wants me to run things by her, make sure it’s ok with all the others who live in “me land” before I start putting other posts out there. 

But you know what? Hate is a strong word as I often say to my kids…but I really do hate bureaucracy!  Even the internal kind!  This evening has me at my desk trying to honour my truth even though I feel uncomfortable, exposed and very much out of sorts.  So I do what all great procrastinator’s do when they don’t want to do something they know they need to do!  Suddenly it’s time to finish re-decorating my office, sort and file all the bills that have been paid and are waiting to be filed, make a genius looking excel spreadsheet organizing my children’s entire schedule for the coming school year…need I say more?  I can get very creative in an un-creative kind of way and fill my life up with “stuff”.  Stuff that gets in the way and has me running through a self constructed obstacle course in order to get to where I supposedly want to be…sitting here writing!  My heart already know the way home…it’s me that that wants to avoid feeling what I am feeling.

So in the midst of writing this post, I pause again allowing distraction to carry me someplace else…this time though these words from Anais Nin jump out from a book I am absently reading.  “There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk to blossom.”  This is me in this moment and for the past few days!  Going through change is scary, exhilarating and painful all at the same time!  I have more moments of fear and pain and am still waiting for exhilaration to pay me a visit …but the truth of this message still finds its way home! 

Opening up is not easy. Telling the truth is even harder! But, the alternative – of denying me to myself  – that has been a life sentence!  Coming out of my home made prison feels scary.  Those who have found comfort among the four walls of their own cells will understand what I mean.  We become so used to looking out at the world from behind the steel bars that it is easy to forget that the bars are actually keeping us in instead of the other way around.  Coming out into the light is terrifying! 

This is yet another transition that I am going through.  I am in what Nancy Aronie calls, ”half-cooked soup” in her book, Writing from the Heart.  And half cooked soup doesn’t really come close to the exquisiteness of taste found in fully cooked soup! Perhaps I just need to let things simmer on away on their own time for now.  Who knows I could end up learning  to swim once and for all!