January 20, 1999 -- Then and Now

I don’t know how to write three pages of this “stuff.” ... I feel scared. Stupid, guilty, ashamed. And angry, but what else is new? I never seem to be able to get past emotional baggage… I’m embarrassed by who I’ve been and what I’ve done to people close to me. ... I feel like I have no right to feel as I do or to feel with the intensity that I do. What’s wrong with me?

So begins my Artist’s Way journey, January 20, 1999. I recently unearthed these journals from my basement storage shelf, following a hunch that I might learn something from my younger, pre-scholar self. Or that she might want to say something to who I am today, a fiercely feminine circle-way kind of gal.

The first thing that pleases me about this new beginning, way back when, is that I began with I don’t know how to write… There’s honesty in that, even as I was clearly writing those pages I supposedly didn’t know how to write. I was already willing to trust that I knew more than I thought I knew, just beginning. 

I’m also drawn in by the intensity of emotions. Most of them negative or difficult, admittedly. Something in me persisted long enough to find a container for what I needed to get outside of me somehow. I’d tried journaling over the years, but my inner critic would always throw sand into the gears, eventually stopping me cold about three days into the ‘new journal project.’ These pages were not supposed to be anything but drivel. How freeing that was for me! How salvific even. I was finally going to get underneath some voice or presence in me that had kept me bound for two decades. I didn’t know it yet, that day, but I celebrate that now.

Then, of course, there is the shake-my-head disbelief and bemusement. I’ve been on the healing journey for well over three decades now. Picking up Volume I of these morning pages, I was expecting to do an archaeological dig into what I was feeling back then, thinking about back then. It was over 20 years ago, after all. I’ve come so far. As I read these words, I was stunned...

I could have written much of what I wrote that day in 1999...yesterday. These voices are still in my head today. I don’t know how to write… I feel scared, stupid, guilty, ashamed, angry, so what else is new? I feel like I have no right to feel as I do… You have to laugh, really. I did, out loud. Brian wondered what was so funny. Humility, I said. The gift that just keeps giving. I still live in this fantasy that as I heal and mature, I will leave who I was behind as I transform, getting free of all that has bound me over the years. I will be smiling into a new, whole ME. Yet never a day passes that I don’t catch myself in self-denigration, that I don’t repurpose the shaming voices, that I don’t see me taking on guilt that is not mine...blah blah blah… A good friend confirmed it, as I shared a little bit with her. “Yep. That sounds like the you I know when you’ve had a bad day.” Sigh. Disbelief, but bemusement. 

Because why would I want to leave any of my selves behind? Each has done the hard and joyous work-play-rest of becoming who I am today. I have been transfigured. I have gotten underneath the voices so many times now that I do know the way out from underneath them. A circle of women, for one. Deep belly laughter with friends. CrossFit in a community fierce about wellness. Staying at the page and staying curious. Always curious. It’s not a very nice myth anyway--to leave behind a self who has served me so well over the years, right? She’s weathered the non-circle years, the years of no feminine companionship and no prospects of it anytime soon. She learned to stay with her passion and to be fierce for herself when no one else really would.

So I’m settling into the journey this semester of finding out more about who she is and what was rising for her in this pre-scholarship time. Writing a dissertation. Reorienting to a creative life first and foremost. Learning the politics necessary to navigate a conflicted department. Looking for love in more of the right places this time. Finding it...or it finding me...much more quickly than I could ever have known. Yes...she’s someone I’d like to invite back to the table, give some space to hear what she has to say.