Illiterations: Laughing At My Own Expense

Sometimes, just these recent years, I feel as though I’m hiding in plain sight.  My world is compartments.  I have the real estate compartment.  The dog-mom compartment.  The “I do CrossFit” compartment.  The “good friend to my girlies” compartment.... And, there’re the little spaces I really don’t want to admit.  I don’t want them to be seen.  They are the compartments filled with my short-comings; my failures; my weaknesses.  In there lie monsters. I’m writing this because I can’t keep it to myself anymore, yet I am fearful of sharing with friends.  I’ve tried to explain this to my loved ones; my mom; my sister; friends.  I’ve been disbelieved, shamed, abandoned, even lied about, but rarely have I been supported or believed.  So I lay my truths here in this tomb of digitalization, knowing I’ve finally spoken it somewhere, even if only to electrons and silent technology. I think that my community doesn’t believe me because, all my life, I’ve been a warrior.  I’ve been fierce,

My path in life has never been typical.  Being, among many other things, an engineer, I view my life's trajectory in a flow chart manner; I look back and see that everything was a series of either/or junctures.  In this way, I can see, (I fantasize), how my life would have looked if those roads less taken had been the road taken, instead. And, sometimes, I have to admit, that some roads were not taken just because I came face to face with a decision I had been working up to, and then it just seemed too..... scary.  I hate that there are certain things I’ve gotten close to doing or goals I’ve gotten close to realizing, I have veered always from at the last minute because the pressure of getting that close was so intimidating. I know that I can’t list a LOT of “near misses” in my lifetime.  Perhaps I can choose to view that as its own sort of success.  I mean, veering is human, right?  I don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on things I wish I’d done.  That might be because th

I’ve been gone.  I went dark on my blog.  Truth is, I didn’t want to keep writing about my wounds and keep dragging whomever is reading my blog entries through my muck and mire. So much has happened since I shared an entry.  My last one was a bit of commentary on living in the dark during the power-downs last fall.  Not for the first time, I reflect on the irony of those couple of months—we felt has though that  was isolation!  Another responsive reflection though is that it gave my little town of Auburn a chance to practice coming together as a community to make sure everybody had what they needed. So, when March 13th rolled around, and sheltering in place and social distancing and self-isolating became a real thing, I think we were better prepared for having been through the power shut downs.  Yay us! In between all of that, life was really feeling as though I’d found an equilibrium I’ve sought and not had for some time.  My health and strength and vitality — the things that