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2010 is my year, how amazing!, how cool is that?, how exciting!, how intriguing and mysterious, how thought-provoking, introspection
I have done something very brave.
What it is isn’t important – that is, it is very important, especially to me: what I mean is that it isn’t important that you know what it is for the purposes of this piece. I want to talk about being brave, and what that has meant to me, and what that means to me.
I like to know, or at least convince myself, that I have control over how my life goes. I have my little plans, sometimes big plans, and when things do not go according to plan it can be devastating, and, oh, how it has been. I have my ways of seeing the world and when that changes it is hard to cope. What’s even harder is when my understanding of myself changes. I am reasonably sure that my ten-year-old self would cry herself sick upon meeting the present-day me. I did not turn out as I expected, and as I continue to turn and move through life and let myself out of myself, I will continue to become the unexpected. The unexpected is never pleasant for me, in me, simply for not having been in my plan, my ideas.
So, contemplating a different life is scary, and contemplating a different self is terrifying. Enacting it is barely imaginable. And that’s my point, my balancing, my reaching up, of bravery. It is because yesterday, and today, I did something so far out of being in comfort, so alien to how I have been, and so right for what I needed to realise for my life and self, that I am brave.
I feel alien in the new way of being I occupy; I will settle into it. It feels like this will be good. I feel less like my idea of being a person, or this person; I also feel more real. I am waking into myself.
Truly, it’s not so much that I become, am becoming a different self, living a different life. The life I am, have always, been meant to have and the self I am, have always, been meant to be are coming to meet me. It’s my future coming to hold me. It’s the me I am to be holding out her skin for me to climb into, loving me, just as I love that ten-year-old I once was.
I wish you blessings in your life as I wish them for myself for mine. I wish that you are brave, whatever bravery means, or will mean, for you.
Well done, Chally. Your words are quite inspirational.
Oh, doing brave things is … so hard, so tiring, so freeing, so frightening.
Not forget standing in the doorway of the front room having plucked up the courage to tell my husband I was leaving him. The heart beating so fast I thought it would plunge out of my mouth.
So happy for you. And what a lovely post. Thanks for writing it.
I too feel that obligation to not dissapoint the ten year old that I was. I find that weird that I wasn’t aware of that feeling until you described it. Thanks for that.
Congratulations on your bravery. Congratulations on continuing to move forward to being the person who you want to be (and your ten year old self wanted you to be…okay, the tense thing is getting confusing, time-space continuum is too hard for me! :P).
Thank you for making me feel hopeful and happy and pleased. What a moving post. Here’s to a wonderful and brave 2010!
“It’s my future coming to hold me. It’s the me I am to be holding out her skin for me to climb into, loving me, just as I love that ten-year-old I once was.”
Beautiful writing, beautiful thoughts, beautiful you.